


Ghosts In The Water  (Shell Game Prequel: Daniel)

by ivorygates



Series: No Quarter [6]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Dark, Daniel Jackson Would Depress A Hyena, F/M, Female Daniel Jackson, Genocide, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Just all kinds of Darkity Dark Darkness, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Military Homophobia, Non-Sexual Slavery, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Episode: s05e21 Meridian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-17
Updated: 2007-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-13 19:09:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17493590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: "Earth has died and he's gone to Hell and Hell was harrowed and he's in the Waste Lands and Jack O'Neill has been reborn as a woman with his mother's face—hisface—and now the two of them are having sex."S7 AU from "Full Circle".Story title is from "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" by Richard Thompson because of course it is.





	Ghosts In The Water  (Shell Game Prequel: Daniel)

**Author's Note:**

> I am posting a number of almost-finished fics not because I don't hold out hope of finishing them, but because life is never certain. Call this WIP Amnesty if you like.
> 
> This was written sometime around 2007/8 as far as I can remember, because I'd written the Dani version and my then-muse wanted to see the events from Daniel's POV. It isn't finished and probably never will be, but I found it really interesting to see the same events as in "Navigating By The Stars At Night" (the title came from a Mike Doughty song because really) from Daniel's POV. It's amazing how much difference a little thing like gender can make. (And apparently I had Many Opinions on Daniel's possible sexual past. And about monetary systems. IDEK.)
> 
> PS: This will make slightly more sense if you've read the other one first.  
> 

 

_ She sat by the banks of the dirty grey river  _   
_ And tried for a fish with a worm on a pin_   
_ There was nothing but fever and ghosts in the water_   
_ Oh how will I ever be simple again_

_ War was my love and my friend and companion _   
_ And what did I care for the pretty and plain_   
_ But her smile was so clear and my heart was so troubled_   
_ Oh how will I ever be simple again_

_  
Richard Thompson, "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" _

Every time it's the end of the day and he closes his eyes to rest, Daniel sees the same image: Dani's holding the gun and she's pointing it at him. And because he thinks—now—that it might have worked, he tries not to wish that she'd fired.

It's been a long time. He links the days to Stargate addresses—three here, four there, five in the next place—and adds up the string of numbers. Twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven days without seeing a Prior. Without walking through a village whose streets are filled with dead bodies. Without seeing everyone around him sicken and die. Tending the dying, because he could give comfort, and he'd learned that leaving wouldn't save them.

Nothing he did would save them.

He's spent his entire life being called a genius. Not his label. Everyone thinks of themselves as typical, but after his parents had died, Daniel had discovered that he was, in the absolute sense of the word, peerless. No one he met was like him. No one thought like him. He got used to being alone, being clever, smart, _brilliant..._

Discovering—first—how useless it was, and then how valued—Catherine, General Hammond, Sam, Jack _(don't think of Jack; now, ever)_ —and then—full circle—how dangerous and futile.

He's killed everyone he's ever loved. He's killed everyone he's ever known, everyone he ever _could_ have known, everyone he's met in passing, stood in the same room with, seen at a distance, even only had the potential to see someday. Everyone on every planet he's ever set foot on in five years of explorations through the Stargate is dead. And so is everyone else in the Galaxy. The Milky Way holds approximately two hundred billion suns. If one percent of those have planets with people on them, that's two billion planets. He can't even imagine two billion _people_ —though Earth's population was six billion and rising when the Ori came.

They're all dead.

Because of him.

He'd had the best of intentions.

Always did, always had, all his life, and it's never _helped._

If he'd just left everything alone.

But no.

And he knows why, too. Now, when it's too late. He's flayed himself with insight often enough. He fell in love with someone who couldn't want him. And Jack had suspected how he'd felt—hell, Jack had _known_. And they'd both been perfect gentlemen about it—it wasn't as if Daniel's past _(the past of a civilian consultant on a top-secret military project)_ wasn't a quietly open book. So long as his present was above reproach, no one said anything. And oh, he'd missed Sha're desperately, and he'd hated the fact that having a _wife_ —an infested, kidnapped wife, but still, a _wife_ —was his imprimatur of sexual trustworthiness. It felt as if he was exploiting Sha're when she was helpless to defend herself.

And then she died, and he'd felt as if he had to prove himself all over again. Or just escape, because the months had turned into years and every anchor he'd reached for had twisted and changed and vanished, just as they always had, and the unexamined unconscious idea, always at the back of his mind, was that if he could simply do something _worthy_ enough....

Oh, god, could he really have been that stupid?

No. Not consciously. But unconsciously, and that was enough. Even apotheosis, apparently, hadn't been enough to shake that assumption; Daniel wonders if he confronted it during his Ascension. And then Jack—his own chaste secular Orpheus—had called him back from the dead...at which point they all switched myths and Daniel (apparently) decided to play Pandora.

The Ascended are omniscient, possessed of vast knowledge and nearly infinite power (which they never use). Jack said Daniel told him so while he (Daniel) was an Ascended Being. Jack also said he tried to save Abydos from Anubis. Apparently—obviously—he failed. In fact (if Jack was right) even trying was enough of a transgression to get him kicked out of Ascension and sent, naked and amnesiac, to a planet called Vis Uban. He wishes Oma had killed him instead. Because the amnesia was neither complete nor perfect: when SG-1 finally located him there, his memories of being Daniel Jackson started to come back, interspersed with scraps of the knowledge he'd possessed during his Ascension. Those scraps faded, but not fast enough. All he knew at first was what Jack and the others told him: that they were at war with something called the _Goa'uld_. That Anubis was the most powerful _Goa'uld_ there was. That Anubis had destroyed Abydos.

And Daniel remembered Abydos. He remembered Sha're. And he remembered the location of a cache of...something...left behind by the Ancients, because he'd known about it when he was Ascended. And he told his friends (told SG-1) how to find it. By the time they'd saved Kelowna, Daniel had forgotten everything from his time in Ascension. He'd been excited to be back on SG-1, been pleased at the prospect of discovering more about the Ancients...

Still been trying to prove himself to Jack.

That was why he'd pushed so hard to use the communication device they'd discovered at Avalon. Living Ancients would surely prove to be powerful allies against both the _Goa'uld_ and the Replicators.

But they weren't. There weren't any living Ancients in Ver Ager, just a bunch of cowed villagers worshipping something called the Ori. Daniel found his consciousness in the body of a man named Harrid. Harrid's wife Sallis was understandably upset, but she'd managed to protect him at first. She'd told him about the Ori. She'd even introduced him to other...heretics. And as soon as they'd all been gathered together—that night, in secret—to hear him tell them what he knew about the Ascended, about other worlds, to give them _hope_....

An Ori Prior had come and killed them all and taken him away.

He'd been facing the Doci over the Pit of Fire when the SGC finally figured out how to get him back, but by then it was already too late, though no one knew it quite yet. At the same time Daniel was sitting in the Briefing Room making his preliminary report to General Hammond, SG-12 radioed from offworld. They'd encountered an Ori Prior. The Prior was asking to visit the SGC.

The Ori (the Doci) had taken the knowledge of the Milky Way Galaxy—an entire galaxy of 'heretics' shielded by the Ascended—from his mind.

They still weren't certain of what they were facing. Not yet. They needed more information. General Hammond took every precaution. They locked down the Mountain, disarmed the Prior before they brought him through the Gate, manacled him, and filled the Briefing Room with armed SFs. All the man did was preach Origin and submission to the will of the Ori to them for about fifteen minutes and then ask to leave. When General Hammond refused to let him, he broke his chains, called his stave to him telekinetically, and set himself on fire.

A year later, the entire galaxy had gone Ori.

A year later, Daniel was a fugitive.

The Ori hadn't stopped with sending Priors through the Stargates. They'd built gigantic deep-space Stargates and used them to send fleets of unstoppable ships. They'd destroyed the _Goa'uld_ , converted the Jaffa to the Path of Origin...

The Ascended wouldn't help their descendants against the Ori, though Orlin tried. Orlin Descended—a second time—in order to do it. He was only with the SGC for a few hours, and they were never sure who destroyed him: the Ascended or the Ori Priors. Orlin told them _why_ the Ori insisted on worship, and that their claims to Ascend their followers were lies. He did what he could to help them find a cure for the Ori Plague.

But.

Reason is useless against fanatics. And you can only vaccinate so many people. The Priors kept coming up with new plagues, anyway.

Bad enough knowing they were all going to die, but Jack never accepted it. That was Jack. When the Priors finally hit Earth with the Prior Plague—saving the best for last, Daniel supposes—he'd almost started to look forward to dying. Jack and Sam and General Hammond had managed to bury his connection to the Ori invasion deeply enough that it couldn't be found by their own or any other government, and Jack had never blamed him for his part in it, but Daniel had still known he was responsible. Trying to find some _solution_ had been the only thing that had kept him going for all those hellish months.

He'd been one of the last people sent through the Stargate to the Alpha Site. And there, Daniel found out what Hell really was.

Because the Ori and their Priors weren't going to kill him, and they weren't going to let him die. They wanted him to _submit_. Bow down, worship, give himself utterly to the Will of Origin.

He tried.

They killed everyone at the Alpha Site—the last free-willed survivors of Earth. Daniel didn't give in to them then—didn't bow down, didn't submit, didn't _grovel_. He thought of Jack, and ran, and hid, moving on until he found a place the Priors hadn't come to yet. And a Prior found him, and asked again, and Daniel still—god help him—said 'no.'

And the Prior stretched out his hand, and the bodies of everyone in the village around them turned black and rotted, and the flesh slid from their bones, and they screamed, because _they were still alive...._

And when he and the Prior were surrounded by the dead, the Prior left. And Daniel burned as many of the bodies as he could, and stayed as long as he could bear to before he left as well.

The next time, he hid among the Faithful. He spent a week reciting prayers, word-perfect in his morning and evening Prostrations, before a Prior came. And the Prior asked again, and he still hesitated.

And the Prior raised his staff, and everyone around the two of them fell down dead.

_"How could you do this? They're your worshippers! They believe in the mercy of the Ori!"_

To say the words 'mercy' and 'Ori' in the same sentence nearly choked him. The Prior's face hadn't changed expression at all.

_"They exist to serve the will of the Ori."_

He would have knelt then—bargained, argued, still in denial, horrified—but the Prior burst into flames. Gone. Consumed utterly. The will of the Ori. He searched the entire village and found no one alive. There were too many to bury. Too many to burn. He took as much food as he could carry and left.

The next time a Prior came to him, almost a month later, Daniel was on an uninhabited world and he thought he was safe. But the Prior reached out and touched his shoulder, and suddenly the two of them were standing in a market square somewhere. He'd fallen to his knees before the Prior could even ask the question, swearing that he believed in the power of the Ori, promising that he would worship them forever, that he would do _anything_ , if the Prior would only spare these people. The Prior told him he wasn't sincere enough. That he mocked the power of the Ori, the wisdom of Origin. Then the Prior turned and walked away, but he left everyone alive behind him.

The first cases of plague appeared about an hour after the Prior left.

And Daniel prayed. He prayed with them, he prayed _for_ them, he carried water to the dying and washed the filth from their bodies and recited prayers from the _Book of Origin_ over them and promised them, each dying man and woman and child, that they would Ascend and live among the Ori after death.

It didn't help.

The dying forgave him.

They all forgave him.

He prayed until the last of them was dead.

And then he ran. From world to world to world, through empty ghost-cities, across deserts where there had never been cities, through primeval forests, and at last he stumbled upon a world, somewhere—starving, half-mad, exhausted—where the people took him in and nursed him back to health and welcomed him in the name of the Ori. And when he was well enough to stand, he realized he'd doomed them all, so he searched the village until he found a rope, and hid it, and waited until his hosts had left for Prostration, promising he'd follow in just a few minutes. And Daniel tied one end of the rope over a beam of the house, and stood on a stool, and tied the other end around his neck, and kicked the stool away and thought of Aceldama.

He'd died enough times to recognize the sensations, but never before with such a sense of relief.

And he awoke, on his knees, the rope still around his neck, gazing up into the face of a Prior.

And he'd begged. He'd _begged. "Tell me what you want. Just tell me what you want. I'll do anything. Please. Spare them."_

And the Prior told him to choose thirty people and the Ori would spare the rest. And he _still couldn't do it._ Couldn't choose who lived and who died. Couldn't surrender the last tiny part of himself that drew a distinction between being responsible for all the deaths and choosing—personally—who lived and who died.

He'd gotten to his feet and run.

He tries to tell himself—once he goes through the Stargate—that maybe the Prior has left them alive. Hasn't simply killed all of them. What's the point if Daniel isn't there to see?

It becomes the only kind of hope he has left. The kind he tries to kill, world after world, trying to make himself into _what they want._ Trying to believe that the Ori are gods.

He can't.

On some worlds he's recognized. They know who he is—Daniel Jackson, SG-1—and they know—sometimes—that he brought the Ori here. General Hammond scattered half-a-dozen SG Teams across the galaxy, near the end, hoping to seed a resistance. Some of them have survived. He always warns them about what he is, what he's become. It never helps. On one world he's taken prisoner, to be executed for his crimes. The Priors appear and free him, then execute everyone who's so much as seen him, for the sin of interfering in their plans for him.

Everyone on that world has seen him by the time the Priors come.

The Ori draw their power from the devotion of their worshippers. He changes his tactics. Now he seeks out the most heavily-populated Ori world he can find. If they're going to kill everyone who shelters him, maybe he can make them destroy their own power-base. He's gone a little mad, he thinks.

It doesn't work. On the first world he reaches, a Prior orders that ten of the Faithful are to be Cleansed by fire each day at Prostration until Daniel Jackson bows to the will of Origin.

They begin with children.

He leaves.

He hopes they'll stop when he's gone.

He doesn't think they will.

He scavenges the wreckage of a hundred civilizations, walking through empty streets black with the ash of burned books and burned bodies. Even when he finds a place he could survive, he's never allowed to stay too long; a Prior always appears eventually, watching him silently until he surrenders and leaves. He learns to keep moving. Back—eventually—among people.

He spends two weeks unmolested on an Ori world. By now the endless litanies he recites almost comfort him; he doesn't think as he says the words, and wonders if he's managed to become devout. One morning he opens his door to go to Prostration, and a Prior is standing there, holding a sack. He offers it to Daniel, and when Daniel opens it, Lya's head is inside it. Her expression is surprised, faintly disapproving. Daniel walks from the town to the Stargate. Maybe he can contact the Asgard. Somehow. Even thinking that ensures that the next group of people a Prior finds him in proximity to will die.

Why him? What do they want from him that won't be served by either his death or a public show of piety? He'd be happy to give them either—he's tried to give them both. They're holding a whole damned galaxy hostage; he's not egotistical enough to think he can either enlighten or free it; that was always Jack's particular foundationless conviction (he tries, he _tries_ not to think about Jack, but not thinking about Jack seems to be as impossible as acceptable submission to the will of Origin). He's just hoping not to be responsible for the deaths of any more of its inhabitants. That isn't working out any better than most of his recent plans: dying, not caring, giving up. If the Ori have a grand finale planned, Daniel wishes they'd just _get on with it._

If they _do_ have some grand and secret plan, they aren't the only ones who do.

Oma Desala comes to him in his sleep.

Langara was a beautiful world once. It survived its first flirtation with _naquaadriah_ (though _he_ didn't survive its second one); it survived attack by Anubis. It didn't survive conquest by the Ori. Daniel doesn't know what happened here—the SGC only got the report of the initial invasion—but there are no survivors now. The ruined cities are uninhabited. He scavenges for food. If there are plagues, toxins, lethal levels of radiation present...

Well, actually, he hopes there are.

But in his dream, Oma tells him that there is hope. A Grand Ascension is to take place, and the Ori will be cast down forever. He has a part to play in the plans of the Ascended as well as in those of the Ori, though, and his part is absence. His death will be insufficient. He must leave the universe entirely. She shows him how, and where he must go. Even in his dream he's too tired to be angry, to ask her why The Others didn't help them sooner. Maybe they couldn't. Maybe they didn't care enough to. He thought the Ascended were good once, but that was a long time ago—now all he's sure of is that they're not as bad as the Ori.

When he awakens, he's almost certain it was only a dream. He's dreamed a set of Gate symbols he's never known before, but you do that in dreams. Of course, it could be a Prior's trick. Maybe they're trying something new. But by now Daniel doesn't really care. As soon as it's light, he goes to the Langaran Stargate and dials. Whatever's on the other side can't be worse than his life.

He steps through the Stargate into a vast underground cavern. The walls glow brightly enough to show him that the rest of his dream is true as well: there's a Quantum Mirror at the other end of the cavern. No controller. The Mirror is already activated, showing him a familiar vista: the laboratory on P3R-233 where he first found the Mirror. All he has to do is touch its surface, and he'll be in a universe without Ori.

So he does.

There's a controller for the Mirror on the table here, and he shuts the Mirror down. The sensation of safety leaves him feeling a little nauseated, and it takes him almost an hour to decide what to do. He realizes that he needs to try to figure out how to contact the SGC—even if he has a double here, he knows he has forty-eight hours to pass on a warning against ever using the long-range communication device before he has to leave again. If the SGC even _exists_ in this reality—he knows no Gate Team has ever been to P3R-233, because the controller for the Mirror is right where he found it the first time. He goes to the Stargate and dials the address for the nearest world he can think of that might have a GDO, an IDC, and no _Goa'uld_. Cimmeria.

And there _is_ an SGC here: Gairwyn recognizes him and contacts Earth. They send SG-1—and Jack is so damned glad to see him that Daniel would cry if he had any tears left. Jack is also stunned and suspicious, because apparently Daniel died on Kelowna two years ago in the lab explosion and didn't Ascend (or come back). And so Daniel has to start with explaining about the Quantum Mirror—on Cimmeria, since they're not going anywhere until Jack's satisfied that Daniel isn't either his own robot double or something else they haven't seen before—and he's barely gotten halfway through that story when a Prior walks through the Stargate.

Too late. Somehow, too late.

Daniel tells them _(tells Jack)_ everything he can think of about the Ori and the Priors—it all comes out in a garbled rush—the Ori shouldn't be here if he hasn't gone to Ver Ager; he can't have gone to Ver Ager if he died on Kelowna and never Ascended, never returned—

"If we're infected, we can't go back to Earth," Jack says harshly.

"If I go—leave your reality—he might follow me," Daniel answers desperately.

Jack strips off his tac-vest and thrusts it at Daniel; all the help he can give. "Go."

Daniel runs toward the DHD.

The Prior doesn't stop him.

From another 233, Daniel speaks to the SGC by radio (Jack's radio). The Priors are already there. Too late, too late, too late. He turns off the radio in mid-sentence and walks away from the Stargate.

He was supposed to be safe. He was supposed to be _free_. To have had the hope, the illusion, even for an hour or so, that he'd finally _escaped_ , is a cruelty more horrible than anything that's preceded it. He spins the Controller and touches the Mirror again, not caring where he goes. This time he uses the Stargate to go to a deserted planet—he knows the addresses for a number of deserted planets by now—to see if he can stay in this universe at all. To decide what to do. If the Ori are going to follow him to every universe he goes to, how can he keep doing this?

Maybe it wasn't Oma after all. But that doesn't make sense either. In his own universe, the Ascended shielded his galaxy from the notice of the Ori. That should be true in every universe. He had to go to Celestis to destroy that lack of awareness. He can't have destroyed it _universally._

Can he?

Maybe the Priors are only seeking him out in each of these universes because the Ori are already here. It's possible. He waits, thinking— _trying_ to think—knowing how far from being able to think clearly he is. Should he be using this 48-hour window to warn this universe? Or waiting it out? Sam—or was it Dr. Carter; Daniel can't remember now—told him once that there are an infinite number of quantum variations; does it matter whether or not he misses warning one?

He thinks about seeing Jack again. Alive, and it doesn't matter, because a Prior came to Cimmeria, and that's the beginning of the end. He clutches the vest in his hands. All the pockets are full. Daniel sits on the ground, his back to a tree, and investigates the contents. Some he puts into his shoulder bag. Some he spreads out on the ground, a catalogue of the life and times of a dead man twice-removed. Jack always kept a surprising number of non-regulation things in his vest pockets. Aspirin and rubber bands, Chapstick and C4. Grenades and a pocketknife, a pad and pencil, a tin of camouflage grease and some chewing gum. Shooter's earplugs and a lighter. A bandana and a length of coiled-up fishing line, with a couple of hooks carefully secured in masking tape. A yo-yo. Powerbars. Daniel eats two of the Powerbars (the sweetness is shocking) and plays with the yo-yo while he waits; reminder of happier times. Daniel's still taking inventory (there are a lot of pockets in a tactical vest) when the Prior arrives.

He realizes that this is what he was waiting for, whether he understood that or not.

"This isn't your world," Daniel says. He thinks, perhaps, he's finally managed to lose all hope, and wonders if that will save the people here.

"All worlds belong to the Ori," the Prior says.

And Daniel gets to his feet, dropping the vest on the ground—he doesn't want to look at the Prior and think about Jack—and walks slowly back to the Stargate.

The Prior doesn't follow.

 

#

He stands in the lab on 233 holding the controller in his hands, paralyzed by the thought that the entire quantum web of universes has fallen to the Ori because of _him_. He needs to try a universe farther away. He's not sure why. Maybe just to know if he's right. If a Prior shows up in the next one, he has one last Stargate address he can dial. He's been saving it.

P3W-451.

Finally he activates the Mirror and spins the controller. One last universe, one last chance. But this time there's someone already on 233 when he steps through. Her name is Danielle Jackson, and she's never heard of the Ori.

There's a planet called P4X-384 where (she tells him) she 'always' goes to wait. She says it's completely uninhabited. They go there together. To wait.

She still has her gun. The clip has four bullets.

More than enough for a double suicide, except for the fact that apparently she can't die any more than he can. When she sees him looking at her Beretta, she tells him about the times she put it to her temple, into her mouth, and pulled the trigger. They stay awake for the entire 48 hours, telling their stories to each other. Slowly. In layers. First the innocent parts: _I'm Dr. Daniel/Danielle Jackson of Stargate Command, a member of SG-1. In 1994 Catherine Langford asked me to translate the Coverstone her father had excavated at Giza..._ Then the less-innocent parts: _During our fifth year of missions, we went to a planet called Kelowna..._

Their histories (his and hers) diverge there. He died on Kelowna; she was sent to an alternate universe by an alien race she assumes are the Furlings, to a point in time three years in her own world's future. That universe's Daniel Jackson had died on Kelowna and come back, but he'd never contacted the Ori. The Furlings had taken him, and hidden him, and substituted her. It took her two weeks to find him, to recover her memories of Kelowna, and get back to her own universe, escaping the explosion in the _naquaadriah_ lab and saving her team. She returned to her own reality with, in effect, knowledge of the future: Furling gifts. She used her knowledge to manipulate events to try to save her Earth, because the Daniel she'd met had gained knowledge in Ascension—he'd apparently done it twice—that he'd used to save Earth from an attack by Anubis.

And what she did failed.

In her universe, Anubis gained control of an Ancient machine capable of wiping out all life in the galaxy. He came to destroy Earth first—and claim her. Jack sent her through their Quantum Mirror as Anubis was besieging Cheyenne Mountain. She's been running through the Mirrors ever since, because every time she stops, the Furlings show up and offer people...gifts.

In every universe where they've accepted the Furling gifts—she warns them against it, but often she can't stop them—Earth has been destroyed. One way or another, and she thinks the Furlings simply fold the whole universe into nothingness after that. The Furlings want something from her, too, only she doesn't know what, or how to give it to them.

Daniel tells her about the Ori. About losing Earth, losing the galaxy—everyone, everywhere dead. Running. Hiding.

"If I hadn't told," he says. If he'd just kept his mouth shut until more of his memories came back—or went away.

"If I hadn't told," she agrees bleakly.

At the end of 48 hours they know that whatever else is true, they can both stay alive here. He can't remember the last time he slept.

They lie down on the floor of the cave on 384. (He's slept in worse places lately.) He falls asleep dreaming of fire. She wakes him with her screams—a nightmare—a few hours later and they go back to 233. If they mean to stay here—in this universe—they need to blend in, and the best place to leave everything they mean to leave behind is in the place they might need to run back to (neither of them questions the assumption that they need to hide, or might have to run). She dresses in his spare clothing and they go through the Stargate.

At first they wander aimlessly, startling at shadows. Uninhabited worlds. He's better at scavenging than she is. She has a better idea of what's safe to eat. He's got Jack's fishing line in his bag. They bait the hook the first time with Powerbar crumbs, the second with fishguts. He has Jack's lighter; she has one of her own. They manage to feed themselves, though not well. They aren't willing to spend long in any one place, or go far from the Stargate. She sleeps during the day—she's quieter about it then—he sleeps at night, knowing she's awake to keep watch.

An Alternate Him should be a fascinating puzzle, but Daniel doesn't give a damn. She found an exciting way to destroy the world—just like he did—and what else is there to say? When they're both awake at the same time, though—or when he can't sleep at night (and he never sleeps well)—they talk. It's not that he's interested, but he feels obligated. Not to entertain someone else—he feels a curious revulsion at the thought—but because what he can tell her might keep her alive. If they're wrong. If the Priors come. And because apparently she feels they're _having a conversation_ , she tells him more about the Furlings. Her guesses and her observations and every way things went wrong in reality after reality.

"So—basically—you just kept screwing up?" he replies.

Neither of them says a word to each other for the next three days. He fishes. She scavenges for firewood and edible plants. He gathers more wood while she sleeps. They keep a fire going. Daniel tries to disassociate himself from the symbolism. _(Hallowed be the Ori.)_

He's gotten used to silence. For a long time—maybe as much as a year; he isn't sure—he's only spoken to recite the Litany of Prostration and to beg the Priors for a mercy that doesn't come. But now the quality of the silence is different. It's a silence shared by another human being, one who has some vague concept of what's _happened._ She's never said a word—not one—to indicate she blames him. That she thinks he could have done anything differently. That he could have found a different—better—solution.

That he could have kept from killing _all those people._

 

#

"Time to go," she says at dawn.

She doesn't need to elaborate. They've been here six days. This is the morning of the seventh. Twelve days in this reality. They get to their feet and walk back to the Stargate. She lets him dial. He's chosen all their destinations so far. She won't know this address either. It's not on the Abydos Cartouche. It's not one from the Ancient database.

"Dani—" he says, as the Event Horizon establishes. He's not sure what he wants to say.

"Never mind," she answers.

When they step through to the other side, there's a road leading away from the Stargate. Roads mean people. In his universe, there's a village about six kliks up the road. He doesn't want to go. Doesn't want to see people. But his clothes are swimming on her, and she's still wearing her SGC boots and carrying her pack. They should be able to trade there—if the village isn't Ori—and cast off the last of Earth. He takes a deep breath and sneezes violently. She pulls off her pack and digs in it for a moment, then offers him a small packet of pills. Antihistamines. Probably the last of their joint supply. He takes the packet. He's carrying a water-skin, not a canteen. He washes the pills down with faintly cool, leather-tasting water.

"You aren't like the others," she says. Her voice is completely neutral, but she told the truth when she met him— _I'm you_ —so Daniel can still hear the undertone: surprise, wariness, and something similar to disapproval, though he thinks it's actually a profound dislike (newly-acquired) for anything she doesn't understand. And he's tired—more than tired—of being singular and special and unique, but the concept of being its antithesis is somehow profoundly irritating.

"There's—there may be—a village up ahead. We need to trade away the rest of your SGC issue. You have to fit in."

She nods, and looks up at the sky as if she's expecting Death Gliders to appear. "I don't know where we are."

"It used to be called Ver Amit." In another world.

"Ori." She hesitates, radiating _inarticulateness._ "How long until they...usually...?"

"They left me alone for about nine weeks once. You?"

"I stayed in one place for three months."

She—usually?—talks more than this, and he can't decide whether he wants her to finish her thought or to _shut up._

"And?"

"He had long hair. It ended badly. They usually come sooner."

At least sixty days to wait to see if this has worked. Finding out if it's Ver Amit at the end of the road will be a start. "Come on."

The village at the end of the road is called Amilent, not Ver Amit. It's larger and cleaner than the one he remembers, and no one there has ever heard of the Ori. The people are friendly, and not wary of strangers, and it only takes a few minutes of asking questions before they're directed to the house of a woman who has clothing for trade.

Dani wants clothes like his, but the woman she's talking to—her name is Dosel; apparently she's the headman's wife (logical; only the wealthiest people in a village like this would have spare clothing)—is firmly refusing to trade a set of men's clothes to his 'sister' (he doesn't think Dani would make the world's most convincing boy in any event), but is certainly willing to trade. At one point, listening to the two women wrangle delicately, Daniel catches himself starting to recite a homily from _The Book of Origin_ about the appropriateness of offering kindness to strangers, and closes his mouth abruptly. Dani gives him a startled glance.

He turns his back and walks outside. Amilent is a large more-or-less Early Medieval village, which means that its inhabitants farm, and the fields surround the village, and the village is very little more than a wide street lined by structures ranging from plain one-room cottages with thatched roofs to the more elaborate two-story structures like the alehouse and Dosel's house. A few steps down one of the wider and cleaner alleys, and he's in the commons, grazing land which circles the entire village. The grass is kept short here not by machines, but by geese.

The antihistamines have left him feeling spacey. Or jittery, or sleepy, or maybe he's just going crazy. (Crazier. Again.) He walks away from the house and sits down on a bench in front of a building across the square. In another world it was a tavern until the Ori came. It's still one here. After a minute or two, the landlord comes out and tries to make conversation. Daniel's out-of-practice at talking to people. The man goes back inside and returns with two wooden tankards of beer. A gift to a traveler. They sit and drink and eventually the landlord goes back inside and even more eventually Dani comes out of the house across the square with Dosel beside her. Dani's wearing an ankle-length skirt and a thigh-length tunic. There's a shift under the smgarments; he can see the edges of it at the neck and wrists of the tunic. A pair of brown boots, handmade, held closed by wide leather lacings. He gets up, and the world reels slightly: beer, and pills, and no food this morning. He walks over to them. Dosel tells him his sister is very pretty.

"She's invited us to stay for dinner, and she'll put us up for the night, but I've told her we need to leave in the morning," Dani says.

He doesn't want to stay here at all. But arguing with her in front of Dosel won't look good. He nods. They arrived here in early afternoon; it's probably at least a few hours till the evening meal. Dani tells Dosel they're going to walk around the village. She's gotten a cloak as well—she's traded away everything for her new outfit—her BDUs, her pack and vest, even Jack's yo-yo. She traded away his spare clothes as well, for a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese and a piece of cloth to wrap them in that they can take with them in the morning.

"I wanted those back," he says, when they're out of earshot.

"You'll want the food more," Dani says. "And we're going to need the cloth for handkerchiefs. Those were the last of the antihistamines."

"You told her we'd stay." Daniel's not sure why he's trying to argue, or what he's trying to argue about.

"Hot meal. How long since you've had a real one?"

He can't actually remember. "You?" He's not sure why he's trying to start a conversation, either.

"I don't know." She actually stops to think about it. "A couple of weeks, I think."

 

#

That night they share a pallet in the loft of Dosel and Egrant's house. They're surrounded by servants and half-a-dozen children. It's warm and he's full. Dani falls asleep immediately—Daniel envies her that—but just as he's about to drop off she's rousing, on her way into another nightmare. He shakes her—one hand over her mouth, the other raised to ward off her half-conscious attack. At least, with her legs tangled in skirts, she can't _kick_ him. When he's sure she's awake, he lets go.

"Sorry," she says.

"Okay," he says.

She turns over, presenting her back to him. The rest of the night passes without incident. In the morning—the morning of their thirteenth day here—they step through the Stargate again.

 

#

On the twentieth day, Daniel's picking something that you might as well call apples and Dani's back at the farmhouse doing chores. She was churning butter when he left. He's starting to wonder if this is what being alive feels like. He isn't sure whether it's too much work or not.

He isn't sure what the _point_ is.

But it's been twenty days without Priors (or Furlings). Twenty days without seeing anyone who's so much as _heard_ of _The Book of Origin._ Counting Amilent and this one—Rosti—they've visited four settlements. They're trading labor for food and shelter. Staying alive. Tholund says he'll need help in the orchard for another day or two, perhaps three. He says there's another steading a day's walk up the road that might need labor if they want to try there. Daniel's not sure he wants to go that far from the Stargate; they're already several hours walk from it here. He supposes he'll have to ask Dani's opinion. He's already pretty sure what she'll say. _We should see._

He used to speculate about things. Solve riddles. Unknot puzzles. Analyze data: feelings, perceptions, information. Now the reflex of introspection gives him the sensation of an amputee relying on a missing limb. Despite that, he can't help wondering why Dani's pushing so hard to grasp at the mechanics of survival. He can tell it's a strain.

Shouldn't they just give up?

But he tried that and it didn't work and now he just feels...unsettled. Angry without emotion. Panicked without fear. A constant sense of pressure that he doesn't know how to satisfy.

So he picks apples.

At the end of three days Tholund sends them up the road with half a cold meat pie and tells them they can give his name to Herkja and Oldar.

Of course she'd wanted to go.

It's summer here, and they carry their cloaks. She walks up the road ahead of him—they don't really have much to say to each other; he supposes that's odd—and he thinks about a universe where _he_ was _she_ but SG-1 was still the same. And he thinks about Jack because he can't not.

Easier for Jack all around in Dani's universe. Or harder? "Do you suppose Earth is here?" he asks, lengthening his stride just a little to catch up to her. If he talks, he doesn't have to listen to his own internal monologue.

She frowns as she thinks. He's never watched himself think. He supposes he has the same mannerisms. Or might. If they're just alike, then she was in love with Jack, too. _(Don't think. Don't listen.)_

"The planet, almost certainly," she says, and he can hear the puzzled note in her voice that they're having this conversation—or _any_ conversation—at all. "We're not. This universe's potential Dr. Jackson, I mean. Maybe the Earth Stargate was never found."

Because he wasn't here to open what Senator Kinsey had always called—and now Daniel thinks he was right all along, if for the wrong reasons—Pandora's Box. "No SGC, then," he says.

"So no Abydos rebellion. Ra still rules. Unless the _Goa'uld_ don't exist here either. It's possible," she continues.

He's not sure whether the _Goa'uld_ had reached (in his own universe) any of the worlds the two of them have been on or not, so there's no way to tell one way or the other from what they've seen here. He doesn't remember whether there was _Goa'uld_ damage on this version of 233. The _Goa'uld_ warning sign had been near the Gate (in his own universe), but the Gate Room had been dark, and Dani only had a failing flashlight. They could have missed it.

"But the Ancients—the Ascended—exist," he says. "Because the Stargates are here. So the Ori—"

Could still come. Could still come _here._

"—may never have split off from the Ancients. Or the Ancients may never have learned to Ascend in the first place. And even if they have—" she stops abruptly.

"What?"

"Everybody's safe so long as nobody digs up the Gate on Earth," she says flatly.

Because that's where it begins. With the Stargate. If the Stargate is unearthed, sooner or later _someone_ will make it work. And the _Goa'uld_ will destroy Earth even if nobody else does. "It might not even be there," he offers. _The Stargate might not even be on Earth._

"Or civilization evolved in a completely different pattern. Or there was no Giza rebellion either." It's odd to think of a _Goa'uld_ -ruled Earth as being preferable, but he's seen the alternative. And so has she.

They walk on.

Herkja and Oldar have a large freehold, and it's harvest time. They're happy to have extra laborers, even if unskilled ones. There's no room for him and Dani to sleep in the main house, but Herkja gives them a blanket and tells them they can sleep in the hayloft. Work for a week, perhaps. Depending.

 

#

It's the end of the day. Their first full day at the freehold. They've spent it in the field; the two of them have been following the reapers (nobody with any sense is going to let either of them near a scythe) and all of the laborers are drenched in sweat. They come back to the farmyard and strip down to their underwear—the men on one side of the yard and the women on the other, but they're not that far apart—and there are barrels of water that have been warming in the sun all day (but they're not that warm), and everybody stands around pouring buckets of water over themselves and each other, washing off the sweat of a day's labor. There's laughing and horseplay and rude jokes and jostling. Daniel looks over to the women. Looking is not only allowed, it's apparently encouraged, but that's not why he looks. He just wants to see where Dani is. Being shoved around doesn't bother him—he barely notices—but she really resents it. If she's shoved enough, she shoves back.

She's standing at the edge of the crowd, soaking wet. Her shift is muslin, and right now it's transparent, clinging to every inch of her. Her nipples are hard—the water is cold—and she's standing with her legs spread, braced, slowly pouring a bucket of water over her face and chest. Her eyes are closed. And it isn't the first time Daniel's seen Dani half-naked, but it's the first time the sight's made him hard.

He's shocked at his body's response. Shocked at the sense of being alive. It feels like an intrusion, an unwanted assault. As if it's something she—someone—has done _to_ him. He picks up an empty bucket and plunges it into the nearest barrel. When he pours it over himself, the shock of cold takes his breath away.

 

#

He's managed to —forget? —excuse? —suppress? the memory of it by the time they're lying in the loft together that night. It's been a long hard day, and there will be another one tomorrow, and the laborers receive (literally) stunning amounts of food and drink at the end of the day, but even so, he doesn't think he'll sleep tonight. His mind has returned, as it so often does, to the gun. It's back on 233. It still has four bullets in it. There's no Prior here to force him to participate in a glorious resurrection.

He's almost sure.

Not quite sure.

No SGC to warn, because if _he_ doesn't exist, it's unlikely the Stargate Program does. And for all he knows, trying to warn them is what attracts the Priors. Dani thought that warning her set of SGCs might have attracted the Furlings, but she was never sure. Daniel's fairly sure the SGC doesn't exist, though.

The gun exists. And Daniel wishes he could make up his mind what he wants to _do_ about it, because what he really wants, more than he wants—has ever wanted—food or sleep or even _oxygen_ , is _peace_. He's not sure there's peace in death any more.

He hears Dani's breathing change, and thinks she must be on her way to another nightmare. If she screams, they'll hear her all the way to the house.

But she doesn't. He hears a gasp, then a long silence before she starts breathing again. He hears her roll over, sniffling a bit—hayloft, dust—then there's silence again. He can feel her watching him.

"You're awake," he says, not opening his eyes.

"I didn't mean to wake you," she answers. He hears the apology in her voice, and feels a combination of irritation and something like grief.

"Didn't really," he answers. "Come here."

He doesn't know why he says it. Because he's thinking about the gun, or because he's trying not to? Because it's been twenty-seven days and he thinks he might have a chance at survival and he thinks he's forgotten how? Because he hopes she'll say 'no'?

But she settles into his arms, against his chest, pressing her face into the side of his neck and shifting her hips against him as if she can't quite get comfortable. She breathes out over his skin and—abruptly—he's achingly hard all over again.

"Sorry," he whispers. _It's normal? It's automatic? It isn't you?_ If it's not her, what is it? _I was thinking about being dead, and I find contemplating suicide really erotic?_ "I, ah—"

She goes absolutely still, but she doesn't pull away. "Sorry. I'm sorry," she answers, sounding as if she feels she's the one to blame. Her body rubs against him slightly as she breathes, and every time she exhales he feels her breath against his neck and chest. She's practically a dead weight, but at the same time, she's so tense she's almost vibrating.

"All right. It's all right." He puts a hand on her shoulder. He means to move her away from him, but his hand slides down her back instead. Warm, human, alive. It's been so long since anyone touched him, and his body wants that even if he doesn't. He thinks about the gun, and Dani, and there's some essential conflation of concept there, as if Dani can be as destructive as the Beretta. As if Dani _is_ the Beretta, a transfer of essential qualities. But she's here, and the Beretta is on 233.

She lifts her head, and now they're face to face. The moon is full and the loft door is open. He can see her clearly. "I won't—" she says, and he can feel her breath on his face.

"Dani. Do you want me?" She'll say no. She'll pull away. She'll realize what he _is._ He already knows what she is.

"Yes," she answers evenly.

"All right." And her shoulder beneath his hand is the cool metal of a gun butt, and her mouth under his mouth tastes of oil and cordite.

 

#

There's Before, and there's After. Daniel knows the exact demarcation point between one state and the other, though he's not sure—not for a long time; not ever, really—what those two states are. He crosses the frontier between them on a summer afternoon when he's sitting on his ass in an ice-cold stream, weak and giddy and languid with orgasm, and his angel-faced mirror image (she doesn't look like him; not really; she looks like the old pictures he's seen of his mother and he's _not going there_ ) opens her perfect pink lips and says:

"Daniel, I'm not letting you fuck me at the bottom of a river so you can make the Good Housekeeping Ten Best List."

And the world reels around him and he wonders if he actually woke up this morning, or if he simply died in _both_ senses of the word— _little death, real death_ —last night. Because that's not her. That's not an echo of him. That's _Jack._ Earth has died and he's gone to Hell and Hell was harrowed and he's in the Waste Lands and Jack O'Neill has been reborn as a woman with his mother's face— _his_ face—and now the two of them are having sex. _Screwing._ Have screwed, will screw—because he doesn't think he's going to stop; can stop; will stop; dares to stop— _are_ screwing, and that's screwed, this whole situation is screwed, and he's just screwed up.

So he smiles. "Not at the bottom of a river, then."

And she smiles back.

 

#

Daniel feels as if he's become two people—only fitting, he supposes, since Dani's apparently used to having a lot of different Daniel Jacksons around. One of him walks and talks and even smiles sometimes and holds a woman in his arms at night and slides into her body seeking release and sleeps afterward, deeply, without dreams. The other one just screams without words as he walks through a landscape of rotting bodies. And after a while, to take revenge on the other, the one who screams begins to talk.

He tells her _every single detail_ of the worlds he left behind. The people he killed—intentionally, by accident. How their bodies looked. One day after death. Three. A week. How the Prior Plague kills. How long it takes one of Earth's major cities to die once ninety-nine percent of its inhabitants have been infected. How Kelowna City looked when he stepped through the Stargate. The way the children screamed as they burned to death. The way their parents smiled. (Hallowed be the Ori.)

He isn't sure what he expects in response. Tears? Revulsion? Rejection? Complementary anecdotes: some ghoulish game of 'can-you-top-this?'

Dani just listens. She isn't pretending to listen, or storing up his words and thinking of how she can use them against him, or planning the best strategic use of the information. She's just listening, hearing everything he says. Daniel can tell.

_'I'm you.'_

And he realizes—about halfway through the days and nights of his confession (and Daniel supposes that's as good a label as any other)—that he could hurt her. _Actually_ hurt her, really hurt her, more personally than just by telling her things that nobody should ever have to know. Things that shouldn't be real. (Things that aren't real here, which makes his memories of their reality both worse and better.) But he doesn't want to hurt her. He only wants to hurt himself. And eventually the immediacy of that impulse passes. The one who screams falls silent, conjured out of being—inverse to probability—with words. Integrated with his other self. The one who lies skin-to-skin. The only Daniel Jackson there is now.

It's been forty-seven days.

 

#

One hundred twenty days, and the Ori haven't come. Daniel thinks—now—that they won't. That—this time—he's finally safe. That there will be no more cities of the dead. Dani's kept him alive. He tries not to resent it, tries not to mind, tries not to wonder why. He knows that she knows what he's thinking. What he's feeling. She's his Quantum Twin: there's no place to hide his _self_ from her, because up to Kelowna, their lives are nearly identical. Same parents. Same schools. Same career. Same disastrous silent unspoken love.

She hasn't talked about her feelings for Jack. She doesn't have to. The way she doesn't talk about him is enough. And, oh, the way she wakes up screaming for him at night. That'd be a clue.

Of course, sometimes she wakes up screaming for Jonas, too. Sam. Teal'c. Or even him.

They don't talk about Kelowna and what came after it now. That's done. Occasionally Dani will offer up a truncated anecdote of a Road Not Taken. Daniel knows they all end the same way—she never tells that part—but the beginnings make suitable bedtime stories, Fractured Fairytales for the end of the world. Most of the time, though, by mutual consent, they stay in the further past. The safe places. Nothing between eight and sixteen, for example. Between sixteen and Catherine their histories still vary—sometimes wildly—but those differences are only interesting.

They need the distraction.

This isn't his longest sexual relationship. That was his marriage. But even if they've only been sexual partners (not lovers) for ninety-three days, Daniel thinks (if you consider it absolutely logically), that this is his second-longest. They're together twenty-four hours a day—more, actually, depending on the length of the local day—and there's little for them to do but _be together_. On the basis of total hours, if you assign those hours to the average number of hours-per-day he would normally have spent with someone he was in a relationship with, it's probably been the equivalent of several months already. Trying to work out a conversion chart between Dani-time and his old reality to come up with a definitive equivalency occupies his mind at odd moments. He knows she knows it. Because she knows him.

Just the way Daniel knows her.

He always used to be good at reading body language. It came with the territory: linguistics, anthropology, the somatic cues that are always the underpinnings of verbal communication, even when they run directly counter to it. And her body language doesn't mutter. It _shouts_. Entire paragraphs— _chapters_ —in the way Dani purses her lips and frowns; hunches her shoulders; raises a hand. It took Daniel a while to realize it wasn't because she's different, but because she's _him._ She knows him better than any normal human being ought to be able to. But then, they're both nowhere near normal anymore, are they?

Fortunately they have that in common as well.

He doesn't know whether he's drowned in his guilt, or learned to breathe it as if it's his natural environment, or become oblivious to it beyond desire for expiation, but the one thing he knows is that he doesn't have to pretend it isn't there. She knows all his terrible not-quite-secrets, just as she knows how he used to take his coffee and how Sha're looked when she laughed and what it was like to see the Coverstone for the first time and the memory of the last time he saw his mother's face. She knows.

She doesn't forgive him. He couldn't stand that. She just accepts him, accepts everything. The disastrous mistakes. The failures of nerve. The blood on his hands.

And it's all right—it's bearable, it's tolerable—because when he looks at her, he sees death as well. She played God. She meddled. Not once, but over and over and over again, bringing universe after universe down into flaming ruin around her because she couldn't stop...trying to help.

Failing.

So he doesn't forgive her, either. Maybe—if they're going to be alive—they both just need someone to remind each of them of what they've done.

It's an odd basis for a relationship. Tacit mutual non-recrimination while you're slowly starving to death somewhere in an Alternate Universe where neither of you belongs. Their days are a constant struggle for survival—food, shelter—they're barely managing a subsistence-level existence, and they can't manage to build up any reserves. Sometimes they can find work, sometimes not. They've stolen fruit out of orchards, vegetables out of gardens. A chicken once. The farmsteads are extended families; networks of closed kin-groups. Good for a few meals—if they're lucky—but not a place that will welcome strangers looking to settle down (and they aren't sure they want to settle down). The villages are better—more use for their skill-sets—but there are always questions they can't answer, and the villages are largely self-sufficient besides. And there's not much of perceived value that either of them can offer to small villages operating at what would be (would have been) the equivalent of an early Medieval level. They could be servants—if someone would hire them. Sometimes they find one where they can stay for five or ten days, but it's always the same: the two of them are outsiders. They don't fit in.

_'Who are you? Where are you from? Why have you come here?'_

They can't live in the wilderness, either. They've tried that. Not every river holds fish and they're both abysmal hunters. Both their lighters are out of fuel by now—they traded them for bread somewhere—and he used one of the fishing lines to make a firedrill but it took four hours to get a fire started. The nights are cold, and the blanket they earned back on Rosti has holes in it now.

Dani thinks they should find a larger town and try there. More social mobility, she says. A cash-based economy will be easier to infiltrate.

 

#

In a city called Jund, Daniel tells stories on the street. Tales of Earth, all the myths and legends he knows. Around his neck he wears a square of lead on a piece of string. It's his license to tell stories. Daniel tells stories, and the citizens of Jund stop and listen. They toss grols and heppins and even hepadins into his begging bowl. The smallest coin of Jund is brass, a grol. The next largest is copper, a heppin. There's also a hepadin—it's silver—and an aldin—a larger silver coin. Ten grol to a heppin. Six heppin to a hepadin. Five hepadin to an aldin.

His license cost four aldin. Without it, he'd be run off by the street patrols—if the patrols are feeling charitable. If they aren't, he'd be beaten and sent to one of Frajur's workhouses. But Daniel has a license, so he doesn't have to watch for the patrols. He has a license because Dani sold her body to any man with three heppin. It took her eleven days to earn the money. She had to pay for the cost of the room she took her clients to; the room where he and she slept when she was finished for the night. She had to pay for the cost of their food, their drink. He'd looked for a way out of the trap the whole time—some other way to earn the money they needed—but every occupation in Jund is licensed. Even begging, which is what he does now.

He could have earned two or three heppin—a day—if he could have found people willing to pay him for odd jobs. In the room above Haymon's tavern, Dani earned as much as thirty heppin a night. She whored herself to keep them alive. Alive and fed and safe. She kept saying that to him every time he went off somewhere without her, because after the long nights at Haymon's she slept late into the day and he was awake, on edge, hours before: _you'll stay safe?_

She meant: _you aren't going to do something stupid and reckless and noble, are you, Daniel?_

He'd thought about it at first. Thought about trying to steal the money they needed. About mugging someone, or breaking in somewhere and stealing something worth selling—he'd known pretty quickly that Haymon would know where to sell it. About eliminating the middleman, going to the Record Hall, and just stealing a _license._

They could just have _left_ , of course. But Jund is the first town of any size they've found. You can buy Stargate addresses in the marketplace—for an aldin—but they don't have an aldin and they don't know that any other world would be better. And in the next town, they'd still need something to sell. So he thought about stealing, and he thought about the risks. Capture, execution (theft is punished harshly in Jund; everything is). It's true they only send you to the workhouses, but they kill you for trying to leave.

And Daniel realized that while he didn't really care if he was executed or not, but if he died he'd be leaving Dani alone, and he can't bring himself to do that, because he cares about her in a way he isn't ready to define. So because he cares about her, he's watched her sell her body without telling her that there was _something else she could be doing._ He's shadowed her on the streets when she walked them to pick up customers. He's sat in the corner of the tavern and watched her take men up the stairs. He's held her at night after she was done working, and he's promised her he'd be safe, and he's kept his promise. He hasn't taken a single risk.

On the day that they move out of the tavern and into their new lodgings—a place Dani found while Daniel was out beginning his new career as a licensed mendicant—Daniel realizes something amazing.

They're both still alive.

The room is filthy and freezing, the bed looks as if it might collapse—and it's probably infested—but it's theirs for two heppin a day. And Dani's looking determinedly blank right now, but she never has to have sex again for the rest of her life if she doesn't want to, and Daniel has money in the pouch around his neck and the prospect of earning more tomorrow.

"Home sweet home," she says. "Sorry, Daniel, it was the best I—"

He puts his arms around her and gathers her in. She sighs and nestles her head against his shoulder. "At least we can afford it," he says. "My turn to take care of you."

And he will. Because he can. He can actually keep someone alive. He can keep _her_ alive. No one is going to come along and make him bow down in the dust and ask him to do the impossible and kill everybody around him when he can't. Nobody's going to kill _her._ There are no Priors here, no Ori. He thinks, now—he's pretty sure—that they'll never come. Just as the Furlings will never come. That means there's just the two of them. Needing to stay alive, any way they can.

He's been able (let's be honest) to manage her almost from the beginning (in some ways, some of the time), something Daniel's not entirely sure she acknowledges. He supposes the converse must be true—logically, symmetrically—but she rarely stoops to subtlety when she wants him to do something. He supposes, though, he wouldn't notice if she did. Managing her has become a comfortable habit. The illusion of control over something in the universe, even if it's only whether or not the two of them are as content as possible. He's able to make her think about things, stop thinking about things, and, of course, to evoke her body's sexual responses fairly reliably. They begin, after all, in the mind, and if there's one thing Daniel knows by now, it's his own (her own) mind. So he can keep her from getting distracted or (conversely) distract her when required. He knows a hundred different ways, physical and mental, and they all work (have worked; maybe won't ever work again; a hardship to confront another day), though women are different from men, and Dani is different from him, and neither of those things trumps the quintessentiality of being Dr. D. Jackson. 'D' for Dan, Dani, Danny, Daniel, Danielle, Dan'yel, Dana're, forever and ever, quantum universes without end, _selah._

But 'manage' is different from 'protect.'

If sex is a drug—and it is; an old and entirely reliable one for him; apparently a newer one for her—then the concept-and-reality of being able to protect someone is an equally potent one. He'd never needed to protect Sha're until he couldn't protect Sha're. He'd wanted to protect Shifu, but Shifu hadn't needed him. He'd protected Jack—who hadn't actually needed him either—the only way he could. Now he'll protect Dani.

He needs to.

 

#

It's bizarre in every way to feel that he actually has some command of his own destiny back, that (because of that) the world has—somehow—become more vivid. But Daniel almost feels as if a part of him that's been asleep—for a very long time—is starting to wake up. He has so many choices now. He can choose what cookshop to eat at in the morning. He can choose what to eat. He can choose what street to walk down, where to stop, where to sit, where to spread out his blanket and set his bowl. What stories to tell, and how to tell them. He knows that when he goes back to their room at the end of the day, Dani will be there. They buy their evening meal together—another choice—and go back to their room again.

More than half of their money goes for food and shelter and to keep themselves clean—something they don't consider a luxury. They try keeping their room clean, too, but only at first. Dani bought a broom to sweep it—a heppin from a broomseller—but she left it in the room when she went out and it was gone when she came back. Stolen. Their room has no lock.

She's furious—entirely out-of-proportion to the value of the loss, because by now they can afford to lose a heppinworth of value—and Daniel points out that it's a cheap price to pay for the knowledge that their landlady (or someone nearby) is a thief. He talks her out of trying to steal it back. _(I want you to be safe.)_ For the first time ever, they have cash and are in a place where goods are freely available for purchase. They need everything imaginable, but they don't have a lot of money to spare. Dani does their shopping, because it begins with research. Hours of research. What's best, what's cheapest, what's available at all.

The first purchase they make—outside of food and room-rent—is new clothing for him, because his clothes are tattered and worn and now that they're managing to wash them, they're starting to fall apart. Apparently, even though he's a beggar, it's appropriate and even desirable for Daniel to be well-dressed. The clothes Dani brings back aren't new, but they're sturdy and clean. Five pieces now instead of three: he has an undertunic and an overvest, in the local style, and actually feels warm for a change.

Once Daniel wore new clean clothes every day. Once he owned an entire closet of clothes, and coats, and hats, and gloves, and scarves, and a dozen pairs of shoes. Once he could walk into an entire building full of food and leave with sacks and sacks of anything he felt like buying, never counting the cost.

Once he didn't know what it was like to have killed more people than he could ever live to count, if he did nothing but count them and he lived a thousand years.

Dani adds his discarded tunic and underdrawers to her own outfit and debates what to do with his trousers. Much of the fabric is still adequate, and they both know how to sew. But sewing equipment (needles and thread, and they haven't seen scissors at all) is expensive. In the end she trades the trousers to the rag-and-bone-seller at the end of the lane for a bone comb and four tallow candles.

They buy a journal to keep a record in—expensive, imported—but both of them feel a need to record their history. They wrangle for days over the precise count of their time here—Daniel thinks she's three days off, somewhere between Rosti and here, but she's _absolutely certain she's right_ and it really isn't worth arguing over. They render an exact accounting, carefully-coded, of the worlds they've visited and the _approximate_ length of their stay on each. The places whose names they do not know, or which only have Gate addresses, they name now: Mirror Planet (P3X-233), Waiting Room (P4X-384), Fish Planet, Primordial Planet, Lake World. A dozen others. They'd be tempted to stay in Jund, except for the fact that Dani can be arrested at any time for what she did at Haymon's, and neither of them wants to go through the trouble of breaking her out of the workhouse and making a run for the Stargate. Besides, the Frajurkindred would brand her. Better to leave.

From the day they walk through the Stargate into Jund to the day they walk back through it again, it's thirty-two days. Enough time for Daniel to earn his new clothes—new clothes for her and new cloaks for both of them will have to wait; maybe in the next town—to get their boots mended (new boots are far too expensive), to purchase addresses for two of Jund's trading partners. Two more towns where they can try their luck.

In the Abydos Cartouche Room, the glyphs were connected by lines, for reasons he (they) never really understood. Daniel thinks he understands them now, even though the Cartouche Room was created by Ra and they've seen no sign of the _Goa'uld_ yet. Out here, people use the Stargate system as a means of transportation, something as ordinary as a road. Rosti and most of the farms and villages they visited bring their produce to Jund to sell. Jund, in turn, trades with a consortium of other towns.

The learning curve has been rough, but Dani was right. Survival is easier in the towns.

One hundred fifty-two days now.

 

#

On the one hundred eightieth day—twenty-eight days out of Jund—they arrive in a city called Saarsabah. It's the largest city they've seen. Really a city.

Their luck hasn't been good. They've been to six worlds and five cities.

Biernor is the first. It's colder than Jund. The Stargate is inside a roofed stockade, because the winters on Biernor, if Daniel correctly understands the answers to the questions he asks, are more than nine months long. They've arrived in the autumn.

The economy on Biernor revolves around hunting and fishing—in the winter—and farming in the summer. In the town itself, there's a large leatherworking guild—Biernor's main export is furs and leather goods—and there's always need for more workers here, even unskilled ones. There aren't the same kind of proscriptions against working as there are in Jund—no licenses required—but the society has strongly-defined gender roles. If she is Daniel's wife, Dani will be expected to stay home and keep house. If she is not—a woman with no family, attempting to earn her own living—she's fair game.

If she's his sister—a middle ground—he can protect her, but the employment he can seek is limited. Merchants and masters who will take a single man into their households won't take one who comes with the added baggage of a sister. They stay long enough to figure this out—two days—and move on. Jund heppin and hepadin are accepted in Bienor, so at least they can buy food and lodging during their stay.

Since Jund, Daniel's realized how much he relies on being able to take care of Dani, and how much she takes care of him, because neither of them is quite willing to take care of themselves anymore. (Jack used to gig him for that self-directed indifference, the nascent form of it anyway, and so—he knows—he has a lever to use against Dani if the worst possible moment ever comes, though he doesn't think he'll like the fallout.) They're a Parliament of two in an infinitely-populated nowhere; at least he has company.

Gadeius is warm, which is a relief to both of them. (They were born in Alexandria, and it doesn't matter where they've lived since, or for how long; their internal thermostat, it seems, is set to prefer a temperate-to-desert climate.) The civilization here looks almost Roman, and the rolling hills around the Stargate are covered with orchards and vineyards. The city proper is surrounded by farms. They stop at one of the farmsteads on their way into the city, and the farmwife gives them bread and milk and tells them that Gadeius welcomes travelers and new residents.

They spend ten days there. This time Dani tells stories to earn money—the coins are square here—while Daniel does odd jobs in the marketplace, anything that requires lifting and carrying. He's hoping to find steadier work, but here, as in so many places, it requires being known. Learning the local customs. Seizing opportunities.

In his old life (it's possible to think about that now, when it's necessary) he never got time to study the cultures they encountered. First Contact gave time for only the briefest assessment. Hostile or friendly? Strategically useful or "only" of scientific and cultural interest? Now the analysis he—they—can do of a new culture is even more of a survival skill than it was before. But such analysis takes time. And—still—so much of their time has to be spent on surviving. Gadeius is an expensive city to live in. They can afford either food or shelter. The climate is warm, so they make the same choice that so many of the locals do: at night they sleep in the warrens of tunnels in a cluster of disused and half-ruined buildings that edge the marketplace.

At night the tunnels are lit—very dimly—by twists of rag in dishes of grease set in niches in the walls; the crudest sort of lamp. If you sleep here, you contribute to the cost of the light, a half- _rute_ per night. The _rute_ is the smallest coin in circulation in Gadeius; it won't even buy a loaf of bread. As far as Daniel as been able to tell, the honor-system prevails: the money is collected by an informal Chairman of the Tunnel Light Committee and the light is maintained. It's reasonably quiet down here at night—people have sex all around them, and babies cry, but as far as he can tell, nobody tries to kill anybody—at least not violently.

The two of them argue about the tunnels' original purpose to pass the time. He thinks they might be part of a sewer system. She thinks they're the remains of a hypocaust—the architecture is Roman enough for these people to have invented (or retained) the hypocaust. If the two of them had lights, weapons, and free time, they could explore more thoroughly and settle the question, he thinks, but nobody they talk to knows anything more than that the ruins comprise the oldest part of the city and that they flood when it rains: over the years, the city has been expanding away from them, onto higher ground. They've been burnt over several times, and unsystematically looted for building material. Hard to tell much about them now.

But the warren of tunnels provides a sheltered place to sleep for the city's homeless, and the two of them soon learn the knack of finding—and defending—a place to rest for the night. They're hopeful. They're becoming known in the marketplace. Soon they should know the city well enough to try to fit themselves to it in a more permanent fashion.

One day—delivering wine to a shop—Daniel sees most of a _zat'nik'a'tel_. It's impossible to tell how old it is, and the shop sells (as far as Daniel can tell) oddities and curios, not weapons: the owner has no idea of what the object is, and Daniel doesn't tell him. But it's his first indication that the _Goa'uld_ exist in this universe.

He debates about simply not telling Dani, but at the end of the day, when they meet, she looks at his face, then takes him into the upper parts of the old ruins. The footing is treacherous, and he weighs more than she does, so it takes her almost an hour to lead him around to the place she wants to show him, and she won't explain in advance. He has a pretty good idea of what she means to show him before they get there, though.

She's been poking around a bit, looking (she says) for privacy and maybe a better place to sleep. The stones here are weathered with exposure and age, but when she wets them down with water the faint traces of the most sheltered carvings become clear (abysmal archaeological technique, but effective). _Goa'uld_ symbols. Only two of them are clear. They don't form any word or name he recognizes.

"I saw a broken zat today," he says, sighing. "Somebody was selling it as a curiosity."

"So this might have been a _Goa'uld_ world. Or... they knew of one. They might have used these symbols as decorative motifs; brought the zat from somewhere else."

"Maybe," he agrees cautiously. They have no way of knowing. "They aren't here now." That's got to be good enough.

On their ninth day in Gadeius, soldiers come to the tunnels. The smell of smoke rouses them; it's hours before dawn. They're the first to wake. Daniel moves over to the nearest sleeping body. "Wake up! There's a fire!"

The man startles awake, swearing. (Touching anyone in the tunnels is asking for trouble.) Then he smells the smoke. He rolls to his knees, clutching his possessions and wailing. In moments, everyone in their stretch of tunnel is awake, and the noise begins to awaken people in the cross-tunnels as well.

"What? What's going on?" Daniel asks. He hears the panic in his own voice. Fire shouldn't terrify him this way, and it didn't before the Ori. It's not panic so much as sublimated rage, even though he knows that the Ori, the Priors, aren't here. _(He hopes desperately they aren't; if they are, the first thing he'll do, Daniel tells himself, will be to snap Dani's neck.)_ He feels her take his hand and wishes his weren't shaking. They press themselves back against the wall. People are panicking now, and they've both been well taught not to rush blindly into a situation before they know as much about it as possible.

"It's the Guard! Run!" It's not the man who answers—he's already fled. It's a woman. She's holding a baby. It isn't crying; it's common practice in the tunnels to give infants and small children wine to make them sleep.

Dani digs quickly in her pouch with her free hand and pulls out a coin. It's a silver _didra_ , one of the largest denominations here. She holds it just out of the woman's reach. "What do they want? What will happen?"

The woman hesitates. "They're smoking the tunnels for laborers. _You_ can buy your way free, if you're lucky. Your man they'll send to Atronso, if they catch him."

Dani gives her the coin. The woman snatches it and runs, bent over in the low tunnel.

The two of them look at each other. They're already coughing with every breath, but running is hopeless—there are probably Guards covering all the exits from the tunnels, and whatever Atronso is, it sounds bad. They have to hide here. The soldiers probably won't come inside; there isn't room to stand completely upright, even in the main tunnels. They pull out their makeshift handkerchiefs and their waterskins, soak down the cloths, and put them over their faces. Then they crawl deeper into the tunnels and pull their blanket over their heads.

All he can do is hope they've made the right choice.

They survive the day—barely—lying with their faces pressed to the floor of the tunnel and breathing through wet muslin. Daniel's not sure whether he falls asleep or passes out. He dreams of the Cleansing, dreams of Priors, and wakes up with Dani's hand over his mouth, muffling his screams. He has a pounding headache. His eyes are swollen and his throat is raw. But the air seems clear now, although the tunnels are now pitch-dark. They grope their way slowly and cautiously toward the outside. Thank god neither of them is claustrophobic. When they near the tunnel entrance they can see that it's nearly sunset. They approach the opening cautiously and crouch there, looking out. In the distance, they hear the normal sounds of the city. Both of them are desperately thirsty—all the water they were carrying is gone, used to keep the cloth they breathed through wet—but they're afraid to go out. They retreat back into the tunnel and wait for darkness. That night, no one comes to join them.

At intervals, one or the other of them goes to the opening to check the time. When the moon rises, the two of them crawl out of the tunnel. Daniel is stiff and aching, and they've both been too thirsty to eat the food they have. "Let's go," Daniel says. His voice is a cracked whisper. He doesn't mean just out of the tunnel. He means out of the city. Through the Stargate. _Somewhere else._

Dani doesn't argue. Their clothes reek of smoke. Daniel's afraid the soldiers will pick them up in a day or two anyway; it's going to be obvious where they spend their nights. And conscript labor is never a good cultural indicator—he doesn't expect to find a modern democracy anywhere out here, but there's no point in being an idiot. By keeping their eyes and ears open during their stay they've managed to pick up the addresses of a couple of Gadeius' trading partners, so at least they have places to try.

The city is quiet enough in the middle of the night that they're willing to risk stopping at one of the public fountains to drink and wash their faces. They fill their waterskins. They're too exhausted to risk an unknown destination immediately, so when they reach the Stargate, they dial back to an old one. Lake World.

It's midday there when they step through. It was getting colder the last time they were here, but it's warm now; the seasons have changed. They head immediately for the lake. They couldn't afford the public baths on Gadeius; it's been twelve days since either of them has been able to do more than sluice off a bit at one of the fountains. And they haven't been able to be intimate since Jund. Biernor was too cold.

They strip off, wash their clothes and spread them to dry on the ground (not perfect, better than nothing), and plunge into the water. No soap, unfortunately, but at least by the time they come out, most of the smoke-smell is gone. They sit on their blanket, drying in the sun, and eat: hard white cheese and harder brown bread, and a handful of dried figs. They have food for tomorrow, too, but then they'll have to move on. At least they have coins.

Dani's skin is a collage of brown and white. Her face and hands are darkest; they're always exposed. Shoulders, upper chest, forearms, lower legs, turning dark: Gadeius shut down in the middle of the day for the midday meal (nobody on the street for her to tell her stories to) and he thinks she'd been going off and sunning herself in the ruins then. The rest of her body is pale. She has the same scars (more or less) that he does, in the same places. The ones on his torso are white against his skin by now; he's spent a good part of the last ten days stripped to the waist. She moves into his arms, certain of her welcome, and the feel of her skin sliding over his is soothing and arousing and comforting all at once. Slow and easy this time, he thinks, and they'd better remember to cover themselves afterward, or they'll both be courting sunburn.

She tastes of salt and honey, cheese and figs. Daniel wonders how many months a hundred and sixty-four days of constant presence renders out to, and he thinks of Sha're, his lovely _(wise)_ , innocent _(strong)_ , compliant _(brave)_ wife of four hundred and eighteen Abydonian days. Dani isn't innocent, and she certainly isn't compliant. He wonders what this is that they're doing together. Making love? That would imply that they're lovers, that either of them still has the capacity to love; he doubts that's true. Seeking comfort, being kind? Maybe kindness is still possible, and comfort is something each of them wants for the other. Sex and love and friendship—in the modern world _(the dead world)_ —they're supposed to go together. In Daniel's world that has been rare. His relationships with women have always been complicated. Each one intense. Each one teaching him things that—in the end—he thinks he would have been happier not to have learned.

Asexuality wasn't a choice in the 20th century; Daniel'd grown up tentatively identifying himself as homosexual (although to be fair, it hardly mattered which gender he _wasn't_ having sex with). Kate was his first—his very first—girlfriend. Harvard. The idea of her was shocking to him, the reality was glorious. He was wildly in love with her for two weeks, they dated for six months before she dumped him, and afterward—alone again—he wondered if he'd gone straight.

He hadn't. There was Michael on the rebound, but by then his 'definitely gay' self-image was thoroughly tarnished. Susan told him he was bisexual (and wouldn't sleep with him). Elio told him _he_ was bisexual (and would). For the next six years Daniel slept with whoever was convenient—meaning whoever had the interest and the energy to pursue _him._ Brief, inconclusive relationships, and he kept waiting for something definitive to happen, something that would tell him which sex was the one—the single sole gender—that he was supposed to desire. Not fall in love with; he wasn't—absolutely—sure about love. He wasn't sure—later—that he'd ever really been in love with Kate, or whether the romance had actually been with the idea of normalcy. It would have been nice, Daniel sometimes thinks wistfully, to have been ordinary—average, typical—in some area of his life.

But years passed and nothing happened. No grand epiphany, nothing to tell him that, yes, from now on it will be men, or yes, it will be women, one or the other, world without end. He stopped worrying about it. Scholarship was of more immediate interest, anyway.

In Chicago, there was Sarah. She was brilliant and beautiful, and she pursued him with great determination. Daniel actually found Steven slightly more interesting, but Steven was aloof, irritating, and probably straight. The shape of things to come, Daniel supposes, though Jack was rarely aloof. So Daniel surrendered to the available—if not the inevitable—and everyone said they made such a lovely couple. For a while. And he was still _(always)_ more interested in his work _(obsession)._ And there was a screaming fight _(entirely one-sided and the side wasn't his)_ and Sarah dumped him _(too)_. And by then the seeds of his research _(obsession)_ had borne fruit _(insanity)_ and he left the Institute to pursue what he'd hoped would be a fruitful line of inquiry. He hadn't wanted to drag David down with him; David Jordan was kind, and had been a friend until he died _(murdered by the Goa'uld; there's a form of poetic injustice in that)_, but David was always a gatekeeper of the Establishment. To associate the Institute with Dr. Daniel Jackson's radical theories would have been a poor repayment for all Dr. David Jordan's generosity.

His grants had come through. Daniel had gone to New York. There'd been no one there. An occasional one-night-stand. Men were simpler. Less confusing. Or less confused. Purely physical transactions that left Daniel feeling incomplete. By then he'd accepted that his sexuality was going to be no different than anything else in his life: complicated, esoteric. At least he wasn't fixated on women's shoes.

Then Catherine had come, and there was the Stargate. _Sha're_. His wonderful, beautiful, perfect wife. He'd fallen in love with her easily, completely, naturally, and had meant, hoped, assumed, expected, that it would be forever.

And it wasn't.

And then there was Jack. Who was none of the things to Daniel that Sha're was, except someone he loved. And Jack?

Loved him.

Unfortunately.

Because if he hadn't—if there hadn't been kindness, fondness, affection, respect, _love_ there—Jack would simply have had him transferred to another team. Or to a desk. Or hung him out to dry after the Ori came. Or shot him. And he never did.

But Daniel _fell in love_. And Jack just loved. Jack was calmly, quietly, unshakably straight. It wouldn't have mattered to him whether he was in the Air Force or the East Village. Jack wasn't homophobic. Jack just _wasn't interested._

But there was more than enough homophobia to go around under The Mountain. The literal sort, the 'fear-of-spiders' sort, and the uneasy jokes Daniel overheard—most people didn't know about his past, though Jack did (and Daniel didn't exactly have a present, not while he was searching for Sha're)—had the quality of whistling past the graveyard. As if homosexuality, like vampirism, were some occult contagion—a metaphysical _Goa'uld_ that might leap out of the shadows and possess some hapless victim at any moment. Reason enough, when his feelings...didn't change, precisely, but clarified, for Daniel to be far more careful, more circumspect, than he would have been if he were innocent.

Innocence. Guilt. They made him feel guilty about who he chose to love, _how_ he chose to love, and Jack knew, and pitied him for it. That was the worst.

Until the Ori came, that was the worst.

And now he's here. With another woman—but can he really say that, considering that she's (actually, secretly) a version of him? And is it a relationship, or is it a profound lack of choice for both of them? Sha're was Dani's sister, not her wife, but Dani searched for Sha're's brother Skaara with the same desperation that Daniel felt in his pursuit of Sha're, even though Skaara wasn't her husband and Dani wasn't in love with him. She was in love with someone else.

He doesn't want to think about that right now. He doesn't want to _think._ He wants oblivion and Dani can give it to him.

The next morning they move on.

 

#

On Atranus they're immediately jailed for—as far as Daniel can figure out—looking for work. He's never really sure what happened there. One moment the two of them are sitting in a tavern—it caters to travelers, so they must get some—the next, the local police are coming through the door and dragging them off to the local lockup. Their possessions are confiscated, they're put in separate cells. He spends most of the night alone in a cell until Dani shows up with the keys, carrying their cloaks, his bag, the guard's truncheon, and looking pleased with herself.

"Weren't you locked up?" Daniel asks as she opens the cell door.

"I told Barney Fife I had something I wanted to give him."

"A headache?" Daniel suggests.

She smiles, and brandishes a sheet of parchment. "I think this says 'Proscribed Worlds.' I found it in his desk when I was looking for our stuff. It has addresses on it, anyway."

"Yeah. Any place that's proscribed here sounds like a good place to try."

He's wrong about that.

 

#

They step through the Stargate. It's cool, damp, and overcast, but not too bad. Daniel wonders what season it is here on Lazan—maybe Spring? He's standing on the steps, looking around, and he's just spotted the city—about half a mile away; looks Late Medieval, but there's no wall—when the wind shifts, blowing toward them instead of away, and suddenly the air is thick with the stench of rotting bodies. Hundreds of them.

His knees start to give way—the _smell_ —and Dani drags him down the steps of the Gate platform. He clutches the edge of the DHD— _Dial Home Device, but you're never going home, you're never going home, Earth smells just like this_...

The next thing Daniel really notices is that he's sitting on the ground—in her lap, really—and Dani's stroking his hair. The air smells clean; they're somewhere that isn't Lazan. He has no idea how long they've been here and whether he passed out, threw up, spoke in tongues, or simply (as seems most likely) had a mild catatonic episode. He supposes he should feel worse about it. But he isn't the one who has screaming nightmares every few days. Or had debilitating hysterics at the sight of summer lightning when they were leaving Rosti. He'd had to carry her through the Stargate.

Neither of them is whole, any more.

"So that was Lazan," he says, taking a deep breath. He sits up, looks around. They're on the platform steps back on Waiting Room. Not a destination with the best of associations—P4X-384 is the first place they went after meeting at the Quantum Mirror—but he's certain she knows the address by heart. And it's safe.

 _Catastrophic disease is a naturally-occurring phenomenon in medieval cultures._ She doesn't bother to say it aloud. They both know it is. Just as she knows that heat lightning is a normal meteorological phenomenon.

And that the Furlings' arrive in a flicker of light.

When he's gotten his equilibrium back, they debate whether or not to keep using the addresses they got on Atranus. Maybe they're all for plague-worlds. They still have one more they got on Gadeius. They could try that first.

"I could go through to one of the Atranus addresses alone," Dani says. Reluctantly, but it's old habit to offer up every option. "Just to check. I'd come right back."

"No," Daniel says quickly. "We don't know what will happen."

They don't know if being however-many light years apart will be enough to destroy whatever has been keeping them safe here, he means. It seems improbable, but nothing that has happened to either of them has ever been very likely.

"Okay," she says, relieved.

They decide to try at least one more of the addresses from the Atranus "Proscribed" list before giving up on them. Kosari is as much Slavic as anything else, and at least it doesn't seem to be in the middle of a plague. They don't stand out too much from the locals—that's a plus. They're cautious, though. The first thing they look for is the local money-changer, to see if they can change their Gadeian coins here: they can, but only the silver ones. The second thing is to buy food, in case they have to run again. Dani bargains with the shopkeepers—there's no central open-air market here—and buys dried apples, dried meat, and oat-cakes. She looks wistfully into the doorway of a shop that obviously sells candy; Daniel can smell the sweetness from the street and it makes his mouth water. She sighs, and turns away. "Something to eat for now, next. Then a place to sleep?" she asks.

He looks at the sky, judging the position of the sun. "Food," he agrees. "And there are a couple of things I want to see first."

They buy bread and a whole chicken (whole bird, anyway) at a cookshop. Probably extravagant, but they can both use a good hot meal, and who knows when they'll get another? After that, Daniel's next destination is the public baths. A Slavic culture should have them, and while their presence is no guarantee that the culture is liberal, their absence is an indication of a need for caution.

There are no public baths in Kosari. The people that they ask are (variously) amused or outraged by the idea.

"You're foreigners, aren't you?" one man says, after Daniel asks about public baths. "Best go to the Prince and get your charter if you want to stay."

"This charter," Daniel asks. "What do I have to do?"

The man shrugs. "Pay. Or if you have skills useful to the Prince, you can sign a bond to work off the fee. It's a good life, serving the Prince."

"What about my wife?" He thinks it would be best to make the strongest claim on Dani that he can. In most places, that's 'wife.'

"Certainly the Prince will take her under his protection if you please him enough. She will live in the _taram_ quarter." From the tone, that's an honor. At least he's made the right choice about what status to accord Dani.

"Thank you for this information," Daniel says politely. The man bows, and he bows too. After he walks away, Daniel glances at Dani. The ancient Rus secluded their women in the _terem._ _Terem_ is ultimately derived from the word _haram._ In Arabic it means 'forbidden.' The women's quarters.

"I don't think I want to live in a harem," Dani mutters, when the man is safely out of earshot. (There was a type of female seclusion practiced on Abydos, but it was much more at-will, and its function was primarily to provide a replacement kin-group for women whose families had been stripped from them by the pit-mines.)

"And I don't really want to be a bond-servant in a version of Medieval Russia where nobody bathes," Daniel agrees.

They're fairly near the center of the city. By now, they've become expert in charting the sociological geography of low-cultural-index towns. Concentric rings of good and bad neighborhoods. Temples, palaces, what passes for city services, and major markets in the center, surrounded by slums, surrounded by better neighborhoods, surrounded by slums, over and over until you get to the walls, people get tired of building, or everything turns into farmland. So far the Stargate has been outside the city everywhere they've gone, even on Biernor, where they'd built a building around it to keep it from being snowed under.

"Back to Lake?" Dani asks. "It's warm, and we've got breakfast."

Daniel's about to agree, when suddenly he hears a new noise, different from the background horses-and-carts-and-people that they've both been hearing since they got here.

Chanting. Bells.

"Let's get off the street," he says. It takes them less than two minutes to find an alleyway narrow enough that the procession probably isn't coming down it—because by then he can hear the tramp of feet in addition to the chanting and bells. A minute later, it begins to pass by along the street right in front of them.

"Fuck," Dani says, very quietly.

The trappings are unfamiliar (thank god), but the men at the head of the procession are obviously priests of some kind. Chief priest, two assistant priests, a couple of acolytes. A lot of jewels. Censers of incense. They're being followed by a chained double-file of prisoners. Maybe twenty. Men and women. Naked, barefoot. They stagger and shuffle along. The marks of torture are plain on their bodies. Branding, flogging, cutting. Some of the wounds are old, half-healed. Some are still bleeding. They're escorted by half-a-dozen solders.

The sound of the procession is loud in his ears. He closes his eyes. _(Hallowed be the Ori.)_ The Priors never needed racks and red-hot pincers to enforce their will. They had plagues. Famines. The ability to strike a man dead with the wave of their hand, to cause a woman to burst into flame, to—

He feels a hand on his arm, and looks down at Dani. He knows what she's thinking (it's not what _he's_ thinking, thank fuck: while she knows the shape of his nightmares they aren't printed on what's left of her soul). _Jack._ Jack wouldn't have let this happen. Jack would have done something. Rescued these people, taken them home. But Jack would have had weapons. Backup. Sam. Teal'c. A home to run to.

There's nothing the two of them can do but stand where they are and watch.

 

#

The procession is, apparently, the signal for all of the townsfolk to gather in the main square to watch the execution, and attendance isn't optional, either. The two of them are heading the other way—back toward the Stargate—when they're rounded up in one of the sweeps. The soldiers ask to see Daniel's charter—politely, all things considered—but they refuse to believe that he's just arrived and has decided not to stay. The only thing that saves the two of them from immediate arrest is the fact that the soldiers have already collected about a dozen citizens (none of whom look really happy to be here), and the two of them are able to make a break for it. They run like hell, hide (checking for pursuit), do some more running. Working their way out to the edge of the city (Kosari is walled; they'll need to work their way along the wall to either one of the city gates, or a place they can climb over without somebody noticing). The priests are burning the prisoners in the town square by then. You can see the smoke from everywhere in the city.

Daniel really, _really_ wants to get out of here.

Getting out of Kosari isn't the easiest thing they've accomplished lately, but it isn't impossible. By the time they manage to get out of the city, though (over the wall down in the slum quarter, where the locals are filching the stones for building materials and the wall is coming down), it's dark. And apparently the Kosari Stargate is guarded at night.

They spend the night in a haystack (not the first time) and plan to leave as soon as the guards do. But the Stargate is still being guarded in the morning, and that's when Daniel really starts to worry. Because while they're watching it—they're about two miles away, but they've got a good sight-line—they see mounted patrols come riding out of the city, and it's always a really good idea to assume _you're_ the one(s) being hunted. They head for better cover, farther from the Stargate. And discover that apparently he and Dani _are_ the ones being hunted, because the patrols continue for days, and there's always a guard on the Gate, both night and day. Dani thinks it's a combination of them being foreigners and fighting with the soldiers that has gotten everybody so interested in them—theocracies are paranoid. Daniel agrees; it's as good a theory as any, and they're certainly not going to stop and ask anybody here.

It takes the locals five days to give up posting a guard over the Gate during the day so that the two of them can make a run for it. By then they've long since run out of food. By mutual agreement, they dial the other address they have from Gadeius. Oraustard.

 

#

They stagger through the Gate on Oraustard wary and half-starved. They'd rather have gone to one of their usual bolt-holes, but they need food urgently, meaning none of their usual haunts, and a new world is a safer place to try than any of the ones they already know. Oraustard isn't a walled city, and unlike the others they've encountered so far, it seems to be built around the Stargate. They encounter locals immediately.

Daniel asks where they can buy food—if Oraustard is a trading-partner of Gadeius, their Gadeian currency will be good here—and is told that there is no food for sale on Oraustard, but that they will both certainly be fed if they are hungry. They're escorted to an enormous refectory—close to cathedral-sized, but only one story tall (he hasn't seen any two-story buildings here) so the ceiling seems very low.

He's separated from Dani there; she's taken to the far side of the room. Apparently men eat on one side of the refectory and women on the other, because some women come out of the kitchen immediately to sit with her, while most of their escort remains with Daniel. Food is set before him (male servers); a large portion of vegetable stew and a generous piece of unbuttered bread. He can see that Dani is receiving the same from a female server. It's midday; the refectory begins to fill with people as they eat, and all of them are given the same food. The table around Daniel fills up as he eats. All men. They look at him with curiosity but nobody speaks to him.

The segregation at meals is interesting—right now it's a data-point, nothing more, and since Dani's in plain sight neither of them is going to make an issue of it. Daniel asks the usual questions: can they stay? Is there work here for the two of them?

"We send no one out of Oraustard," Bauta tells him. "You and your sister are both free to stay."

Daniel catches Dani's eye across the room and mimes quickly, two fingers pressed together at the edge of his jaw. It's so quick anyone else would miss it. Kin. That way they can keep their stories straight. She nods. He'd really like to know more about this culture before defining their relationship to each other, and he knows that the times he has to pretend to be the-dominant-male-disposing-of-his-chattel-property drive her into an unspoken frenzy. But he should have almost as much claim over her as his sister as he would if she were his wife. If he needs to make a claim.

When he empties his bowl, he's offered more, but declines. He hasn't had anything to eat in a while, and it's better not to eat too much too soon. He feels much better after a meal. Ready to run, if it comes to running.

The midday meal is over quickly, and he expects to rejoin Dani after it, but she's led out—by the women—through another door. Bauta tells him that Nuneg is going to find out what her skills are in order to set her to work. Her duties will be light at first; everyone can see they are both weary.

"We could use a rest," Daniel agrees. He pulls out his handkerchief and rubs at his nose, then blows it. And then spends about half an hour doing his best to get the concept of 'allergies' across to Bauta, who at least stops looking worried that he's sick.

He and Bauta—Bauta seems to be a person of authority here—discuss what he can do to contribute to the running of Oraustard. Daniel asks hopefully after a library, but they have none. No bathhouses, either (something to worry about). Oraustard is known for its pottery and raw (meaning undyed) textiles; wool is their chief trade item. Oraustard's primary trading partners are Gadeius, Biernor, and some place called Saarsabah.

Daniel's escorted from the refectory and given what he thinks—at first—is a thorough tour of the settlement, but even though he's tired and still a little light-headed, Daniel realizes two things fairly quickly.

All he really sees is manufacture and production areas. No shops. No taverns. Nothing to do with recreation.

And he doesn't see a single woman or girl. No children, in fact, under about the age of ten, and the ones he does see are boys, all of whom are working. He asks Bauta why. Bauta says that the others are with their mothers, which isn't really helpful, because where are their mothers?

He's given several opportunities to sit and rest while he watches the Oraustardi work, but the tour lasts until the evening meal. At dinner—meat-and-grain porridge; not bad—he sees Dani again, which is something of a relief. She's over on the women's side of the refectory again, confirming his theory that the sexes are segregated for meals. She signals that she's okay but that she wants to talk. But they don't get the chance. After dinner Bauta takes him away to a dormitory and shows him to a bed. There's a chest at the foot of the bed for his things.

The dormitory holds about thirty men, and it's where Bauta sleeps as well (interesting that even though he's obviously in a position of authority his accommodations are no better than anyone else's). There are windows, Daniel notes, but they're barred. He's exhausted, but he manages to stay awake until he hears snoring all around him, then goes to the door and tries it.

It's barred from the outside.

Bauta isn't asleep, though, and asks Daniel why he's out of his bed. Daniel comes up with a tale about needing the privy. Bauta shows him the buckets at the back of the dormitory and returns to his cot; it's one of the ones near the door. Daniel stands over one of the buckets, and finally manages to wring a few drops out—enough, he hopes, to allay suspicion. Then he goes back to his bed. There's nothing else he can do tonight but sleep.

There's bread and cheese and a hot sour cider in the refectory in the morning. He sees Dani, but they aren't allowed to approach each other. He tells Bauta he wants to talk to his sister.

"Now, Daniel, you know you can't do that," Bauta says patiently. "But I tell you what. The Oraustaria is coming in a week. I'll see Nuneg then. You tell me what you want to say to your sister, and I'll be sure she passes the message along."

"All right," Daniel says cautiously. "Thank you."

Bauta claps him on the shoulder and smiles.

That day Daniel works in the laundry; apparently this is where Bauta feels he can serve Oraustard best. It's light work, carrying baskets of dirty linens to the soaking pools and tipping them in. Everyone is cheerful and busy and willing to talk. He learns a lot, and doesn't like any of it much.

Oraustard has a perfect communism. They don't use money here at all. Everyone labors for the good of Oraustard, in exchange for which they're fed—communally—and housed—communally. The sexes—as he's already seen—are kept segregated. They meet—but don't mingle—at meals.

Daniel's best guess is that the Oraustard way of life was instituted, probably several centuries back, as a form of population control. He finds it's not forbidden to talk about the past; it's just that most people don't care. He finally manages to find a few old-timers who are willing to talk; their stories are a tangle of myth and wild speculation handed down through the generations, but Daniel's good at untangling things like that. He can't be absolutely sure, but based on what they tell him and he sees now, it's a pretty good hypothesis that Oraustard was suffering from cyclical famines brought on by uncontrolled population growth before they radically reengineered their society. But they still need to replace population loss and ensure the next generation, and so there's the Oraustaria. For three days each year, the sexes on Oraustard...mingle.

A week on Oraustard is ten days. He doesn't know what Dani has learned because he can't get near her. All he can do is signal her to wait. She looks sullen and hollow-eyed; not a good sign.

This is no place Daniel wants to live. Nobody is cruel, and there's no violence (that he's seen), but it's a little too reminiscent of life under the Ori for his tastes. And there's no freedom at all. Every moment of every day is accounted for—you're either working or eating—and at night he's locked in.

He does wonder where the surplus capital goes. All right, it's a matter of purely academic interest, and largely irrelevant to the current problem. But estimating from what he's seen, there are about two thousand people in the city. From the gossip in the laundry, maybe another four thousand scattered in (perhaps) a thousand mile radius around the city, mining clay, herding sheep, and growing food. All the wealth flows into the city for equitable distribution. They have a thriving offworld trade. Yet nobody lives sumptuously: he's seen no privileged caste, no luxuries. And nobody seems to get much free time: even the Oraustaria only lasts three days.

Once it would have been a riddle he felt he needed to solve. Now the only riddle he needs to solve is the one of _how they get out of here._

He's tried just walking back to the Stargate. As a test. If he's allowed to do that, then he figures it will be safe to tell Bauta that he wants to take his 'sister' and leave.

But he can't. He's always—kindly, gently, firmly—stopped and turned back before he's gone more than a few yards. It's difficult to leave his assigned work-place at all, and if he does make it outside, someone always follows him. They're allowed rest-breaks—frequent ones, actually; the work is constant, but these are hardly sweat-shop conditions—but not to leave their work area.

"Daniel," Bauta says to him on his fourth day here. He's gone outside the laundry again and Bauta has followed him. "Don't let me think you're unsound."

"I don't want to be unsound," Daniel answers cautiously. 'Unsound' doesn't sound good.

"Good," Bauta says. "If you don't work, you don't eat, you know."

"For how long?" Daniel asks, startled. This is the closest thing to a threat he's heard yet.

"Well, that's the sad thing about the Unsound," Bauta says. "First they don't work, so they don't eat. Then they haven't eaten, so they _can't_ work. But then they haven't worked, so they still don't eat. It goes on like that for a while—too long, unless someone offers them charity. I'd hate for you to miss Oraustaria."

"Yeah, me too." He's starting to think that the Oraustaria may be their one hope of getting out of here. It's annoying—at the cosmic joke level—that the first place that actually wants them around is such a pain in the ass.

After his talk with Bauta, Daniel does his best to behave like someone who has embraced the Oraustard way of life. He never leaves the laundry again, and doesn't even think about the Stargate.

As the Oraustaria approaches, it becomes the primary topic of conversation during the day. He soon learns that during the Oraustaria it's permissible for men to approach women, or women to approach men, and Daniel notices several of the women darting speculative glances at him in the refectory. The Oraustaria, as with similar festivals, is a time of license, when most normal social rules are relaxed. Coerced sexual relations are absolutely forbidden—the penalty is death by starvation—as are incestuous relations. The Oraustardian incest-taboos are particularly tricky, since paternity is unknown: men know who their mothers and their sisters are (it's important to ask your potential partner his or her mother's name), but no one knows who their fathers are. Father-daughter incest is a concept the Oraustardi don't possess.

And because of the Oraustardian taboos, Daniel will not be able to approach Dani openly, even at the Oraustaria. The Oraustardi think she's his sister (and they know they're both aware of the relationship), and the Oraustaria is for sex. Specifically for procreative sex. The infertile and the elderly—and those who, for reasons of their own, do not wish to participate—remain with the children. He just hopes Dani will be there.

Considering the fact that apparently these people only get to mingle with members of the opposite sex for the purpose of having sex once a year—and not all of them are permitted to take part in the festival—Daniel thinks it's odd that he's seen absolutely no evidence (so far) of homosexuality. Impossible that it doesn't exist. Sexually-segregated Oraustard should be a gay paradise. Even if there are cultural taboos here against homosexuality, that's never stopped anyone yet. And those prohibitions are usually driven by religion; but as far as Daniel can tell, Oraustard _has_ no religious practice. (Which is also odd.) It can only be, then, that he hasn't been here long enough to be approached. A while longer and he's sure he'll get offers. He's fairly sure where at least one of them will come from, too. By now he's been promoted to heavier work in the laundry; stirring the tubs. His partner in that is a man named Siran. They stand on ladders for hours at a time, churning boiling vats of linen. Siran switched beds in the dorm so he could take the one next to Daniel. There could be any number of reasons, but Daniel suspects he knows the real one.

Two days before the Oraustaria, Daniel arrives at the laundry and Siran isn't there. Another man—someone he doesn't know—is on the other ladder. At his break, Daniel seeks out Bauta. "Is Siran ill?" Daniel asks. He tries to remember if he saw him at breakfast, and he can't.

Bauta sighs heavily. "Siran...was unsound," he answers. "I'm sorry, Daniel. He misled us all."

"Misled? How?"

"Siran... I do not know if you have heard of this, Daniel, please forgive me... Siran thought of men as if they were women. If he survives, he'll be sent up north to the sheep farms. You don't have to worry."

"I see. Thank you." He returns to his work. Later that day, listening to gossip, Daniel finds out just what it is that Siran may-or-may-not survive. The penalty for most transgressions in Oraustard is withholding food—sometimes until the victim dies, sometimes just for a few days. For 'thinking about men as if they're women,' the penalty is gelding.

He and Dani _definitely_ have to get out of here.

 

#

On the morning of the Oraustaria, the men and the women sit on opposite sides of the refectory as usual. Not everyone in the city eats at the same time—there are three shifts—but today the refectory is crowded to bursting. People Daniel is used to seeing are absent and there are many unfamiliar faces here. No one particularly young or old. Only those who will be participating in the festival.

He locates Dani in the crowd after a few minutes search. She's the only one wearing glasses. He's relieved; she figured out the rules early enough to lie.

This morning, instead of bread and cheese and cider, a lavish meal is brought out. Pitchers of beer and wine. Loaves and roasts and pies. When the last server sets the last platter on the tables, it's apparently the signal for the start of the festival. Some people start eating. Others, more impatient, get up at once and begin seeking partners. Daniel eats. It's been a long time since he's seen this much meat in one place. And there's a fruit pie.

Women approach him. He'd expected that; he's new and exotic and not related to anyone in the city. Their propositions are blunt: _shall we have sex?_

"Maybe later," Daniel says.

About a third of the people leave immediately. Others get up, move around, change tables. Dani comes over to his table. She's got a chunk of mutton in one hand and a cup in the other, and she looks rapacious. She sits down next to a boy a few feet away from Daniel. From the look of him, this is probably his first Oraustaria.

"I think it would be fun to have sex in front of the Stargate, don't you?" she says brightly.

The boy gulps and stammers and blushes while Dani assures him that where she comes from, _everybody_ has sex in front of the Stargate. She gets two cups of wine down him—Daniel notices that while she seems to be drinking just as heavily, she isn't. By the time she gets the boy on his feet and is leading him out of the refectory, Daniel is on his feet as well.

It takes some resourcefulness to get out of the refectory without accepting any invitations, but he manages. He hurries back to his dormitory. He couldn't exactly bring his bag with him—or wear his cloak—without raising suspicion, but he'll need them now.

Walking the streets of Oraustard is a surreal experience today. People are necking in doorways, having sex—mostly clothed—up against walls. It's as if he's walked into some bizarre foreign film. When he gets back to his dormitory, half the beds are occupied as well, by couples who prefer a more conventional venue. He walks past them, as if he's on a perfectly innocent mission, and opens his storage chest. He holds the thought firmly in the front of his mind that he's here because he's going to meet a woman for a perfectly innocent reason, that he's come to collect these things so that he can _go have sex._ If his body-language is right, he'll probably be left alone. Nobody's going to be paying attention to much of anything today, anyway. Probably. And fortunately, Bauta isn't here.

He bundles his bag inside his cloak—an anonymous bundle is easier to explain away than a bag that would look as if he's obviously _going somewhere_ —and hurries back toward the Stargate as fast as he dares. There are a few people on the streets who either haven't chosen partners yet or who are looking for new ones, and he dodges out of sight to avoid awkward questions or even more awkward propositions. It takes him longer than he hopes to get to the center of town. He hopes he isn't stopped in such a way that it will be impossible for him to avoid an assignation without raising suspicion. The other thing that he hopes is that there isn't some ritual observance that he and Dani have both missed finding out about that centers around the Stargate.

But there isn't.

The square is deserted when he gets there. Dani's standing by the DHD, wrapped in her cloak, her knife in her hand but—he's relieved to see—the blade is clean. He doesn't see the boy anywhere. She starts to dial as soon as she sees him.

"Where's your date?" Daniel asks.

"Asleep." She shrugs.

The Event Horizon stabilizes and they hurry through.

 

#

She's picked Lake World as their destination. Just to catch their breath. It's warm and it's safe, but the safety is a kind of illusion, because they've tried to survive here and they can't. There's not enough food, and they'd never make it through a winter. But at least there's drinkable water, and they can rest.

They sit down on the steps, their backs against the warm stone, and compare notes. Dani tells him that she's spent the last ten days cleaning wool and preparing it to be spun into yarn. Her reading of Oraustardian society is pretty close to his. The women raise the children produced by the Oraustaria; when the boys are ten or twelve, they're sent to live in the men's dormitories. There've been weirder cultures, even on Earth.

"If I hadn't said you were my sister, we'd have had an easier time getting out of there," he says.

"At least they fed us," she answers.

She looks baffled and almost defeated—in that set stubborn way that reminds him (too much) of Jack, the way that tells him she's at the edge of doing something reckless. Or maybe not, because she _isn't_ Jack. Maybe she'll just finally give up. Five cities—six if you count Lazan—and they haven't been able to make a proper place for themselves in any of them. Not the farms. Not the villages. Not the wilderness. If they can't make a niche for themselves in the cities, what's left?

"We could go to places we know," she suggests quietly.

He knows what she means. Use the addresses from the Abydos Cartouche. Go to places he visited (she visited) with SG-1.

No. Too dangerous.

They know now that there are _Goa'uld_ in this universe. Neither of them can afford to be taken as a host and let the _Goa'uld_ know about the Furlings, the Ori, the Quantum Mirror, the long-range communication device. That rules out more than half their possible destinations. Abydos. Hanka. Cartego. Juna. Probably Kelowna by now—unless it's just gone. Other worlds will still be infested by plagues that the SGC cured—Argos, The Land of Light. They don't dare go to those, either.

Still others have advanced societies—Hebridan, Tollana—but they'd ask too many questions. _Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?_ Daniel doesn't know what they might do with the answers.

They don't know how this universe differs from the ones they left behind: even worlds that would be safe there—Cimmeria, Edora, K'Tau, Latona, Madrona—may not be safe here. Asgard protected worlds, some of them, but what are the Asgard like? What if those worlds aren't protected here? What if they're _Goa'uld_ strongholds? They don't dare find out. The risks are too great.

"Not yet," he says, and she snorts softly. He knows she knows _not yet_ means _not ever._ But she doesn't argue.

"Then..." she says. She stops, staring out over the landscape. He takes her hand and waits.

"They take their wool offworld to sell. Nuneg told me where. We've already been to two of the places, but we haven't been to the third. I have the address. It's a place called Saarsabah."

"Okay. I guess we go there. Did she tell you anything much about it?"

"That there's a trade fair in the spring; that's when they go. That the people are degenerate and unclean, but they pay well."

He shakes his head. "Not really useful."

"No." A pause. "Daniel?"

"Hm?"

"Could we stay here a while? Just a few days?"

"As long as we can," he promises. He puts an arm around her and pulls her close. She sighs, and settles against him.

Dani is sterile. She doesn't menstruate, because she's had a hysterectomy. In a society of women, she couldn't keep that a secret for very long. Ten, twenty days more, maybe, if they'd stayed. In a society of breeders—a cruel term, but for Oraustard, accurate—she'd be a second-class citizen. He wonders how she would have been treated when they found out.

He's sure she knows.

Each of the places they've been has been bad in a different way. He's supposed to be a goddamned prodigy, a cultural expert, able to talk to anyone and fit in anywhere. Not starve to death through a combination of incompetence and bad luck. Maybe it was _all_ luck—before—and that luck is gone. But by now survival is a reflex, a habit that has passed from her to him. So they'll rest here for a while and then try Saarsabah.

There has to be a way to survive there.

 

#

They probably stay on Lake World longer than they should, but the fishing's okay in the morning and evening—they bait the first hook with a few scraps of mutton that Dani had stuffed into her skirt pocket—and it's warm enough to sleep out in their cloaks, since they lost the blanket back on Oraustard. But finally they have no choice but to go on.

They step through the Stargate using the glyphs Dani has. There's always an exciting moment of uncertainty these days: has the address been written down correctly? Is the information accurate? Are they going to survive their first few seconds on the other side of the Gate or simply fall down dead?

They survive, once again. He takes a deep breath of relief and begins to sneeze violently. He hears her groan in agreement.

It should be better after an hour or so. Not good, of course, but better.

Even with his rapidly-filling sinuses Daniel can smell juniper and lavender and roses—that's most of what set him off; her too—and a strong scent of oranges. Probably a grove. Late afternoon here. Much too warm for their clothes. Summer, judging by what's in bloom. There's a wide road leading toward from the Saarsabah Gate. He can see the city in the distance. Like so many cities of antiquity and outer space, it's surrounded by a wall.

"Big," Dani says uneasily. Daniel nods. It's bigger than Gadeius, and Gadeius is the largest settlement they've seen yet. Saarsabah is something on the scale of Classical Rome, and, like Rome, built by the side of a river. It's at least two miles away.

They walk slowly toward it. The road is lined with trees. Fields. Orange groves. As they get closer to the city, there are buildings. Maybe taverns, customs houses. He sees a smithy; there are a cluster of buildings built right up against the outside of the city walls, implying both wealth and peace.

"Wonder what the prices are like here?" Dani mutters.

"We'll find out," Daniel says.

"I'm sure I can find something to do," she says, her voice carefully neutral.

Their greatest financial success so far has been her career as a prostitute in Jund. Daniel says nothing.

They enter the city. There are gates, but they stand open, and he doesn't see any guards. After their recent experiences, the first thing they want to do is find out just how crazy these people are, and in what way. Nobody stops them as they wander through the city. All the women are veiled (headscarves; Dani puts her cloak back on and raises the hood), but they don't seem to be oppressed, and women walk about unaccompanied without difficulty. They see markets—buying and selling—no indication of mass executions or deranged priests, and not too many soldiers or policemen. Nobody here seems nervous but them.

After they've spent an hour wandering around the city, Daniel—cautiously—approaches a stranger and asks the way to the public baths. He receives detailed directions, and they walk toward them.

 

#

"I wonder if Hygeia was a _Goa'uld_?" Dani asks.

"She was Greek, not Persian," Daniel answers absently. "And this isn't a _Goa'uld_ world."

The public baths of Saarsabah are enormous. The building is about the size of the Parthenon: steps of golden marble lead up to a portico fronted by columns of something that looks like (and probably isn't) carnelian. There are unfamiliar symbols carved into the pillars at each end of the steps, but from the way the people are going up the stairs, it's easy to guess that the symbols mean that the baths are segregated into men's and women's sides.

Daniel thinks about Jund.

He 'came out' (if that's the right word, since he hadn't exactly been _in_ ) in 1980, just after the heyday of the infamous-and-legendary bathhouses, but he certainly spent enough time on the fringes of gay culture (never really accepted; not good enough to be gay; not "good enough" to be straight; an old wound) to hear all the stories about them. And while the primary purpose of a pre-modern bathhouse will certainly be bathing, it was never the only purpose. That was why the Church closed the ones in Europe.

They needed working capital on Jund. They need the same thing here. This city looks promising. They're out of choices and almost out of money. He's been watching Dani all the way to the city. She knows that prostitution is quick and certain money, sex a commodity always in demand. She's trying to figure out the best way to go about doing it now.

"Come on," he says.

Along the street fronting the bathhouse there are several wine-shops. Daniel makes Dani wait outside as he checks them. The first two are obviously far too expensive for them to patronize; they couldn't afford anything there. They go farther down the street. The next one he tries is filled with soldiers; the local equivalent of a military bar. Another has only men at the tables, but he thinks he's reached the right economic level now, and when he finds one with men and women seated together—and empty tables—he beckons Dani inside. He takes her over to a table—they're both copying the body-language they've seen here as best they can—and goes up to the counter.

"Are these good here?" he asks, holding out a handful of coins. Silver and copper and brass. They counted their money back on Lake World; at the moment, he's carrying all of it. There isn't much.

"I don't take grols or rutes; you'll have to change those at the market. The rest are fine," the counterman says.

Daniel asks for a cup of the cheapest wine. From the counterman's face, it isn't an unusual request. It comes in an unglazed clay cup; the equivalent of a Styrofoam cup. Unglazed clay can be broken down and reclaimed; used again. He takes the wine back to the table and sets it down in front of Dani. "Stay here until I come back," he tells her. He drops his bag at her feet and sets his change on the table, all but the brass. He'll be gone long enough—he wants to hope—that she'll need to buy more wine.

"Where are you going?" she asks. The only reason she hasn't guessed what he means to do is because she's been planning to do the same thing.

"Just stay here. I'll be back."

 

#

It costs him all the negotiable coin he has left to get into the baths, and he suspects he doesn't, actually, have quite enough, but he smiles at the doorkeeper and the man smiles back and waves him through.

The public baths on Jund were nothing like this.

In the outer room Daniel strips and gives his clothes to an attendant. He's sure it's customary to tip, but he has no money left that anyone wants. He asks the man's name, and promises to remember him when his fortunes change.

"Come to Saarsabah to make your fortune?" Oselam asks.

"I've come to the baths to make my fortune," Daniel answers evenly.

Oselam inspects his naked body critically. Daniel tries not to mind. "Soldier?" Oselam asks.

"Sometimes," Daniel answers. "A long way from here."

"You might do," Oselam answers. "I'd wash first, though. You smell like a wet horse." He hands Daniel a towel and waves him inside.

 

#

The baths are more Roman than Persian—not that Saarsabah is exactly Persian to start with. Hot and cold soaking pools, massage tables, steam rooms. Every possible amenity is offered: barbering, wine, food. Daniel goes into the hot pool but skips the cold—he's supposed to be on display, after all. As he wanders through the complex, attendants come up to him, offering services. But all of them cost money, and Daniel waves the men away.

 

#

"Wine?"

Another boy with a tray.

"No. Thank you. I'm sorry—"

"Perhaps you would allow me to buy for both of us?"

Daniel looks up. A man has approached him. Dark hair, graying at the temples. Muscular and heavy-set, body just starting to soften with age. More than a few scars. Daniel has no idea what sort of a proposition this is—or even if it actually _is_ one; social customs vary wildly, especially if you're on an alien planet—but he knows where he has to begin. "Of course," he says.

The man is wearing a kind of kilt—a lot of the bathers here are wearing those instead of towels—and apparently it has pockets. He takes several coins and places them on the tray, removes two of the cups and hands one to Daniel.

"Mikai," he says.

"Daniel."

Mikai walks off, gesturing for Daniel to follow. Mikai talks about the weather (it's been good), the fact that he has dreadful luck at dice and drinks far too much (a day at the baths is the cure for that—and, of course, drinking more wine), and the recent fortunes of several groups that are (apparently) sports teams. They wander, in a seemingly-aimless fashion, through a series of rooms where men sit and talk with each other, receive manicures and pedicures, and engage in other innocent public acts.

Daniel's thoughts aren't innocent. He's selling himself—is trying to sell himself, hopes to sell himself—and despite the clinical necessity of it, he realizes that he's still hungry for the feel and taste of male flesh. The hard muscle of a male body under his hands. Freedom and license to touch.

It's unfair that he should, in any sense, conspire in his own whoredom. Equally unfair, he supposes, that he should desire men in the first place, though he never really settled the question in his mind of who that was unfair _to_ : he never felt—until the very end—that it was unfair to _him_. And one has nothing to do with the other. Prostitution and sex. One is a transaction. The other is pleasure. He's always taken pleasure in male bodies. After scholarship, his deepest and most reliable pleasure. He never hurt any of his male lovers the way he hurt the women in his life.

_(Of course they're all, men and women both, dead now.)_

And it's been years since he's held—been held by—a man. He misses it. God help him, Daniel doesn't feel guilty right now because he's about to sell his body—if he's right about Mikai, and if Mikai will agree to pay him. He feels guilty because a part of him is going to _enjoy_ it.

They come out of the last room into a corridor that contains a series of curtained alcoves. Some of the curtains are looped back; Daniel can see that there are couches inside the alcoves. Some of the curtains are drawn, and the sounds coming from behind them are faint, but unmistakable.

Yes, he was right.

"I thought we might sit for a while and talk," Mikai says, putting a hand on Daniel's arm.

Mikai wants him, but will he pay? Daniel stops, taking a deep breath. "My time is expensive," Daniel says.

There's a faint glint of amusement in Mikai's eyes. "Oselam told me. He said you asked a silver ashraf."

Suddenly Daniel realizes that he has no idea what the going rate is here—what the coins are worth, what he should charge. "That's right," he says evenly.

"Expensive," Mikai says.

"I said I was."

"Very well."

 

#

By the time Daniel leaves the bathhouse he's made three ashraf, been shaved and barbered and massaged at other men's expense, and has a working understanding of the currency of Saarsabah.

Fifty copper abbas to a toma. Fifty copper toma to an ashraf. Twenty silver ashraf to a silver mohur. Five silver mohur to a kira, which is gold. The cost of Dani's cup of wine was ten abbas.

If they'd— _he'd_ —just been willing to do this back on Gadeius, they could have just stayed there. Gadeius was expensive, but he's made almost a sixth of a mohur here in just a couple of hours, and you can buy an adequate mule for five mohur—culturally, pretty much the equivalent of a midrange imported car. It's not an absolute equivalency: fewer people here have mules than had cars back in Colorado, and a better way of determining relative value in a pre-modern culture is to index value to the cost of a loaf of bread (he still doesn't know what that costs), but at least he's starting to get a vague idea of his earning power. Before he leaves, he tips Oselam. Ten toma. One is the going rate.

"I'll be back tomorrow," Daniel says. "Silver for you soon. I promise."

"You clean up well," Oselam says.

 

#

He goes back to the wine-shop. Dani's still there, which is a relief. He smiles at her as he heads for the counter, but he knows it doesn't look convincing.

None of her customers ever made her come.

He reaches the counter. "How much is your good wine?" Daniel asks.

"The sweet Falan is two toma a cup, but I only sell it by the bottle, and that's five."

Daniel glances at the bill of fare. It's painted pictures. No prices are listed that he can see. "A bottle of Falan, then. A loaf of bread. One of the large sausages."

"Do you want sauce?"

He has no idea. "Yes."

The total is eight toma, twenty abbas: five for the bottle, one for the loaf (now he knows), three for the sausage, and twenty abbas for the sauces, leaving him two full ashraf and change. He goes back to the table with the cup and the bottle. The counterman's boy follows with the food.

Dani is regarding him with determinedly blank-faced suspicion. He sits down, setting the bottle and his cup on the table.

"There's an inn not too far from here we can stay at," he says. He asked a servant in the baths. "I've got directions. It's supposed to be clean and respectable. We'll have to go soon, though. There's a curfew. I'm afraid you'll have to wait until tomorrow for a bath. I thought you'd want to eat first, though." He's had four cups of wine—he didn't finish most of them—and a couple of little fish-rolls. Drinks and _hors d'oeuvres_ , and he'd been the main course.

The food is on the table. He collects his bag, takes out his knife, opens it, and begins slicing the sausage. There's a moment of silence. He can almost hear her working it out. Where he's been. What he's done. He didn't discuss it with her first because he knows what she would have said, especially after Oraustard. That she should be the one to do it. That the taboos would be probably be less strict, the punishment (if she were caught) lighter. That's true, unless there are no cultural proscriptions here at all. And he doesn't care anyway.

If it's him, it won't be her.

"Are you all right?" she asks at last.

"Were you?" he answers. It isn't fair, but he wants her to think that their situations are identical. Instead of non-identical in a way that makes it the world's worst joke.

"I survived," she says quietly.

"So will I," Daniel says. He opens the wine and pours himself a cupful. There's a pitcher of water on the table; clearly the Falan is meant to be drunk watered. He drinks it straight. It's sweet as honey, sweeter than the wine Mikai bought him, that the others bought him. That was dark; the Falan is pale.

Dani chews the sausage in silence. She doesn't say anything, but he can feel her worry. She's afraid for him, of what he did, and how he did it (whatever it was; in her situation the imagined details were obvious, not in his). She pours herself a cup of wine, waters it, and drinks.

He can almost feel the moment when she lets it go. Not refusing to care, but lifting the burden from him as much as she can. Not demanding, even silently, that he _think of something else to do._ She takes the bread, dips a piece of it in the sauce. Eats. _'This is the bread of slavery,'_ he thinks, and for one wild moment he's afraid he's quoting _The Book of Origin_. But no. Only the _Haggadah_. Maybe they'll actually manage to make it the hell out of Egypt this time.

"I think the locals have invented liquid tuna." Dani dips the bread again and offers it to him. "Try it."

He leans forward and takes the bread from her fingers. The sauce is fishy and salty, a bit gritty, but actually a nice counterpoint to the wine. They eat quickly, finishing the bread and sauce and wine, and take the rest of the sausage with them when they go.

 

#

The inn is clean and respectable (as promised). It costs ten toma a night, and the door actually locks with a key—it's bronze, and nearly as long as Dani's forearm, but it's a real key. Daniel pays for two nights' lodging. They need to find something cheaper, though. He pays extra—twenty abbas—for a pitcher and basin to take to their room; so Dani can have a chance to wash.

She goes up to the room; he goes to the fountain in the courtyard and fills the pitcher and both their waterskins. He's spent the afternoon drinking (and two cups of neat wine at the wineshop) and he's not used to it any more, if he ever was. He feels insulated and a little unsteady. Scrubbed to within an inch of his life, but his clothes are still less-than-clean, and far too warm for the climate. They mark him as a foreigner, too, and while nobody objects to foreigners here, it's best not to stand out.

He goes back upstairs, carrying the pitcher carefully. Dani is sitting on the bed, stripped to her shift. Her skin is sheened with sweat, and she's running her fingers through her hair in an attempt to dry it. When the door opens, she reaches for her knife, then relaxes when she sees it's him.

"Tomorrow morning I'm going to see about new clothes," he says, closing the door and setting the pitcher down. He turns back and locks the door from the inside, struggling for a moment with the unfamiliar hardware before he hears the pins click over. "At least a veil for you. You can't keep wearing your cloak on the street here."

She nods. She's folded the rest of her clothes carefully—there's even a chair here—with his old tunic on top. She strips off her shift, picks up the tunic, and walks over to the pitcher, wetting the fabric down and using it to scrub herself off—face then hair then body—a combination washcloth and towel. He begins to strip, folding his clothes on top of hers.

"After you've had your bath tomorrow, you should start looking around for a cheaper place for us to live, too." He doesn't need to tell her these things. The wine has made him garrulous. And there are too many things he doesn't want to talk about.

"I'll start checking out the city," she agrees.

It doesn't matter so much what they can afford. That's only part of it. What matters is what's available, and what housing costs. That's what she'll find out.

"The bed's clean," she offers.

 

#

He dozes more than sleeps. Dani's body feels alien pressed up against him. Too soft. Too small. Every train of thought leads him inevitably back to Jack, failure, impossibility; he stifles them all and leaves himself stuttering cognitively, circling memories he refuses to evoke and—therefore—unable to think at all. All past roads lead to pain.

Eventually it's morning. As soon as the sky shows light through the window of their room he hears an almost-familiar sound, reminiscent of the _muezzin's_ call to prayer. He wonders what they worship here: Zoroastrian fire? An invisible sky-god? Whatever it is, he hopes they won't be pushy about it. He's not quite sure he can be that accommodating. He swings his legs out of bed and reaches for his clothes. Dani's awake before he gets to his feet.

"I'm going out to see if I can find you a veil. Stay here until I get back. I won't be long."

"You'd better stop saying that soon," she says. She isn't joking. 'Wait here,' has never been something they've said to each other. Whatever relationship they have, it isn't that kind.

"Last time," he promises. He doesn't want to think about what relationship they _do_ have. Not right now.

By the time he reaches the market, the shops are opening for the day's business, and he soon finds the part of the market that sells clothing. There's only one shape of veil used here—a large oblong scarf—but the ornamental variations are endless: beading, embroidery, fringe, block-printing, sequins. He buys the cheapest, a plain length of white gauze, and moves on.

The simplest garments worn here are a plain tunic and trouser of undyed linen. The men's tunic is a little shorter than the women's; that's the only difference between men's and women's clothing. Daniel asks the price, and finds he can afford them; new clothes for him and Dani both. Most people wear sandals here, but he won't be buying sandals today—it's an ashraf for two moderately-good pair, and he really doesn't want to buy cheap ones. Maybe tomorrow.

He goes back to the inn. Dani is sitting on the bed in her shift, eating sausage and making notes in their journal.

"I brought clothes," Daniel says. He removes his purchases from his bag and drops the armload of cloth on the bed.

She picks up the veil and drapes it around her head experimentally. She veiled on Abydos—they both did, actually—it's nothing new. When she sees the trousers, she looks pleased.

"We should be able to get sandals tomorrow," he says. "There shouldn't be a problem with leaving our other clothes here, either. The door locks, and we can take the key."

"All right. Off to the baths. Then I'll take a tour of the city. Meet you back here this evening?" Her voice is pleasant and neutral, just as his was on Jund.

 

#

At the end of his first full day in the Saarsabah bathhouse, Daniel gives Oselam an ashraf when he leaves. "I promised you silver," he says.

"Such generosity will bring you luck, Daniel," Oselam says, smiling.

 

#

Daniel soon discovers that he attracts a particular sort of client, and doesn't know whether to laugh or cry when he realizes he's become the darling of the military trade. But Oselam thinks he's been a soldier, and Oselam is, in some sense (a very real sense), his pimp. Of course word has certainly gotten around among the regulars. _For a good time call..._

Sometimes they want to talk, before and after and occasionally even instead (though they still pay him). Daniel doesn't mind. Idle conversation's a way of getting local information, so he's actually interested in listening. When they talk, they pay well, and after his first cup of hot watered wine at the baths in the morning, he rarely has to pay for anything: shaves, shampoos, massages, wine and savories. The scented oils everyone here favors give him violent headaches, though, so he does his best to wash them off before the end of the day.

The name for the Stargate in Saarsabah is the Saints' Door: the primary religion here revolves around the Saints, who live in the sky and are responsible for all the good in the world, but observance of the local religion doesn't seem to be compulsory.

There's no proscription on homosexuality in Saarsabah, though every man is expected—eventually—to marry and beget sons. Extramarital liaisons, long- and short-term, with either sex, are an expected thing, though adultery (defined here specifically as illicit sex with a married woman) is harshly punished. Prostitution is gently frowned upon—as with many cultures, Saarsabah draws a distinction between 'prostitutes' and 'courtesans'—but primarily for its association with the overtly criminal element: thieves, poisoners, and receivers of stolen property. In the baths, as far as he can tell, it's completely ignored.

The fees the professionals ask vary with position, endurance, endowment—and of course, with age and beauty. His prices are quickly known. An ashraf for penetration, as either the active or passive party. Half an ashraf for fellatio to orgasm; slightly more if it's combined with analingus. These are the basics. Oselam judged what Daniel could ask—and get—with a professional panderer's discernment; Daniel quickly discovers he's midrange in every sense, at least for the bathhouse trade—neither the youngest nor the oldest professional there, and if Mikai said he was expensive, he's certainly nowhere near the most expensive of the bathhouse whores: there are painted doe-eyed boys swaggering through the marble halls of the Saarsabah baths who ask—and get—a kira for their attentions. They're flirtatious and arrogant, their conduct an ugly parody of female entitlement; the power-politics of scarcity. Daniel wouldn't play those games even if he could.

 

#

It takes Dani two more days to find them lodgings that fit their criteria of 'safe' and 'affordable' (available doesn't seem to be a problem), and by the end of his second full day as a bathhouse whore, Daniel's reasonably certain of being able to make anything between four and six ashraf a day. His first day here, obviously, was beginner's luck. Or the lure of novelty.

Their new landlady's name is Mimlal; she runs a sort of apartment house in one of the poorer quarters of the city. She wants ten days rent in advance before she'll let them have a room—one of her cheapest ones, on the top floor of the building. It takes most of their money, but it's still cheaper than the inn.

On the evening of their second day at Mimlal's house, Dani tells him that she thinks she can work as a scribe here. They already know that the written language is a form of Persian and that most of the population is illiterate. Dani says she's seen scribes working in the marketplace—she looked for them today.

Both of them know Persian—not as well as some of the other languages they know, but well enough to get by. But while to be a scribe doesn't require the purchase of a license, it does require the purchase of a scribe's equipment. The cheapest set Dani has been able to find costs a mohur. Twenty ashraf. They count their coins. A bit over five ashraf short.

Scribe-work is something both men and women can do. A legitimate profession. A step up. And safer. It isn't violence or arrest Daniel worries about in his current occupation, it's disease. They're reasonably sure Dani didn't pick anything up on Jund—there weren't even any tavern-jokes about STDs there—and his partners have all looked clean, but that's no guarantee of safety. Because it's been five days of the baths now, and Daniel is beyond tired of being an object. A marketable commodity. He drinks more than he should at the baths—more than is safe—and he knows he's becoming careless. He hadn't let himself realize how desperately he wants to stop selling himself until Dani offered a way out.

To buy the scribe's case is a gamble, because it will take all the money they have, plus what he can earn tomorrow, and if Dani can't find scribe-work, they won't have the room money at the end of ten days and Mimlal will throw them out.

He promises to bring her the money she needs by tomorrow. She says she'll sell their other clothes as well. He's glad of that, because he gives Oselam an ashraf each day—at the end of the day, from his earnings—and he can't stop doing that now. He needs Oselam's goodwill.

With what he brings that night, there's enough. Dani buys the scribe's case, and writes a letter for Mimlal in exchange for food (three days of hot dinners; a fair price, she tells him). He knows she thinks he'll stop whoring then, but neither of them knows how much money she'll be able to bring in, or when. Daniel goes back to the baths the next morning.

Dani doesn't say anything over dinner that night. They eat with Mimlal; it's part of Dani's fee. After the meal, Daniel goes up to their room while Dani helps clean up.

 

#

"No more," she says, coming into the room. It's an order. Her voice is flat. He'd be angry, but he can't work up the energy. She pulls a pouch from around her neck and throws it at him. It hits him in the chest; it's heavy enough to sting. "I said: no more."

It's a coin-pouch; the safest place to carry money is in a pouch around your neck. They each bought one on Jund. He opens it and spills the contents into his lap. It's only abbas and toma, but enough that she can probably earn the rent by the time it's due. With what he brought home today she won't need to, but this means they can definitely pay the rent, both this tenday and the one after it, and eat—barely, and only if she keeps earning money. But what then?

They need to wash their clothes, and he has no idea how much that costs, because he knows by now that _everything_ costs. They need a second set of clothes, for both of them, so they have something to wear while they're washing these, and to be really properly outfitted in the local style he should also be wearing a long vest and she should have a shawl in addition to her veil. It would be nice to have light in their rooms at night, but a lamp and oil to burn in it costs money. And is there another bathhouse anywhere in the city? Because if he stops whoring he'll need somewhere else to bathe, assuming either of them can ever afford to do that again. He replaces the coins in the bag, distantly surprised to see that his hands are shaking.

"It's not enough," he hears himself say.

"It will be," she answers.

"You can't be sure," he says. "I need to—"

"No," she says again.

"You don't give me orders," he answers, and now the anger is there. Dull and distant and painful, and he doesn't know who he's angry with most. There's a very long list, and the majority of them are dead, unborn, not here.

"Yes, Daniel, I do, when you need to hear them," she says. She isn't joking, and she sounds _just like Jack_ , and that isn't a joke either. She doesn't mean to. She doesn't do it to annoy, to hurt. She just does it. Daniel sees Jack in her, the way she must see Jack in him. Jack shaped both of them in different ways. Different men, different universes, same train-wreck. One of Life's greatest ironies: even when Daniel cross-quantumly turned into a woman, somehow it didn't fix things between Jack and him.

"What are you going to do if I don't fall into line? Leave?" he asks.

"Don't leave me," she answers. Her voice shows him something he rarely hears, because she rarely lets either of them know she feels it. Pain, sorrow, loss, _need_. And she sounds like _his_ echo, not Jack's. Someone who knows that 'leave' has so many meanings. She sits down on the bed beside him, but she doesn't touch him. He's wanted the solace she could give him—sometimes he's even gotten hard, lying beside her in the night—but he hasn't wanted her to touch him. All she's wanted to do is comfort him the way he comforted her, and while sometimes he's let her hold him in the night, he's never felt he deserved it. He's felt as if he's been lying to her since they got here, and he isn't sure why.

_I wanted Jack. I know you know that. I want men—I desire men—you know that too, and I told you once that I was never planning to have sex ever again with anyone but you, and I'm not sure any more whether I kept that promise or not. If it was even a promise. If you'd even care._

Daniel understands that what he's really been doing since they got here is leaving her. He sold himself so she wouldn't have to sell herself (again), and because it was pleasure (some of it) in pleasant surroundings (all of it), he tricked himself into pretending he was okay with it. That he was fine. And he hasn't been. He's been retreating into himself more and more each day.

There's more than one way of leaving someone.

He takes her hand, rubs his thumb over her knuckles. "I won't leave you," he says. He takes a deep breath. "I won't go back."

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

He doesn't love her and he doesn't want to be loved. But he's tired of breaking things.

 

#

For the next few days, Daniel gets up at his usual time, stays to drink a cup of hot lemon water with Mimlal and Dani in Mimlal's kitchen, then goes off to wander the city. He hasn't been at their lodgings for the last four days, and it would look odd if he started hanging around now. Dani's told Mimlal he was looking for work when he was spending his days at the baths, so he figures he might as well do that now. She also told him it was hard to find, and that seems to be true. There are storytellers in the marketplace, but he's not sure he could compete—the style seems to be very formal, and all the stories he hears revolve around Saarsaban myth: tales of the Saints and their battles against Demons. He's not sure it would be appropriate—or even safe—to tell other stories. Other work—lifting and hauling and carrying—isn't available.

At least he adds to his knowledge of the city. It's large and sprawling, filled with markets and temples and stadia and noble houses. The high-caste Saarsabans speak what sounds like a dialect of Persian. The men ride horses through the streets, and the women are carried in palanquins. The finest houses in Saarsabah line the river. Also some of the worst slums. Daniel stays out of both areas. Both are equally dangerous for different reasons.

After each day spent wandering the city, he returns to Mimlal's (earlier than he did when he frequented the baths). Dani is paying Mimlal for the use of her kitchen table to write letters—her business is thriving—and uses the table to spread out the form letters. She reads them to him—she's fluent in the local lexicography by now—and they practice the ornate written forms together on spoiled pages of vellum and in the back of their journal until his facility returns.

Mimlal asks if he's a scribe, too, and Dani says yes. Mimlal looks pleased, and Dani explains to him that there are men who will not come to a woman for their letters and documents—or to hear them read—whether for fear, or pride, or embarrassment about the contents. But they'll come to him. Mimlal says that if he'll stay home tomorrow, she will say that Dani's husband, also a scribe, is at the house of Mimlal. She will cook them breakfast.

"I earned a chicken today," Dani explains, straight-faced. "A live chicken. I sold it to Mimlal."

"I hope you got a good price for it," Daniel mutters.

"Breakfast," Dani murmurs.

Not only for that day but for two days after that, too, for both of them, so he'd suspect Mimlal got the worst of the deal (if that were possible), but maybe it's just a really great chicken. Breakfast is three different forms of fried grain-product (fried bread, boiled-then-fried oatmeal, and a kind of meatless scrapple) served with butter and honey.

Daniel spends the next day reading letters. Half the men in the district seem to have pressing business that they don't want any woman to know about. He even borrows Dani's kit (and Mimlal's table) to write one or two.

Two days later their rent for the next tenday is due, and they pay it. Mimlal seems relieved. Apparently she likes them, and wishes them well—and that night, when they've gone to their room for the evening, Dani tells him that Mimlal has suggested that they move to one of her ground-floor rooms at the beginning of the next tenday. One of the first floor fronts will soon become available—it's large and bright and airy, and it has a table. The two of them could work there (and give Mimlal back her kitchen, Daniel suspects Mimlal must be thinking).

It's also more than twice as expensive as where they are now. Dani points out that the bed is bigger, too. (And what she isn't saying is that if he doesn't want to touch her, at night or ever, it will be easier in a bigger bed). Daniel sighs.

"Yes, scribes work in taverns," Dani says patiently (going directly to the unspoken talking-point of the problematic availability of the kitchen table). "I tried working in the one down the street, but the light isn't good enough there." She rubs her eyes; the room is dim, but summer twilight is long and he can still see the gesture. They're red all the time, swollen because of allergies and because she won't stop rubbing them. He had it better in the baths; the steam rooms gave his lungs a chance to clear. But it's not her lungs she worries about, it's her eyes. God help either of them if—when—they need new glasses, so adding in eyestrain probably isn't a really good idea.

"What are you paying for the kitchen?" He gets to his feet—they've been sitting side-by-side on the bed; that and the slops-bucket are the only pieces of furniture in the room—and thinks of pacing. But it's too dark for that, and the room is too small; they're lucky they've got a window at all, even if it only looks out onto an alley, and the rooms on the other side don't even have that. He settles for crossing the room and leaning against the wall.

"Not enough to make up for the inconvenience," Dani says reasonably. "We've got this room for another tenday, anyway. At the end of that, we'll know whether we can afford the first floor front. Mimlal will have to evict Ebrai from it first, anyway."

"Um, I'm not sure I want..." He doesn't like the idea of someone being thrown out on the street because of him.

"He drinks. And he's been late with his rent for the last two tendays. And Mimlal thinks he's been giving her shaved coins."

"Oh." Mimlal is fair, but ruthless.

"Yeah, pretty much. She'll probably put him out whether we take it or not, really."

Nearly all the rooms in Mimlal's house are full. It has four floors—as do most of the buildings in this quarter—and despite the fact that the lower floor rooms are more expensive, everyone's are always full. There are two other vacant rooms on the top floor here, but they're more expensive, because they're at the front and their windows look out over the street. This room is at the back, and the window is small. The first floor front will be one of Mimlal's most expensive rooms. Also one of the most desirable. She's doing them a kindness offering it to them first.

Daniel shrugs. He can't bring himself to answer. Can't bring himself to make a decision. He can't believe Dani's suggesting this when they're living on bread and water and the occasional item of food that one of their customers brings in lieu of coin. Dani rinses his clothes in the evening at the public fountain—they're dry by morning—and borrows a robe of Mimlal's when she goes to wash her own. _But they need so many things._

"We don't have to decide now," she says.

 

#

The first time they have sex—twelve days after he's walked out of the baths at Saarsabah for the last time, twenty days after they first stepped through the Saint's Door, it's nothing like he expected. He was expecting—intending—to do all the things she likes. They like. Together. Scribe-work isn't exactly steady from one day to the next, but it pays well enough that Daniel suspects they'll probably move downstairs. If they don't eat well, they can at least be sure of a loaf of bread and a bowl of broth each day. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who needs a letter read or something written; there might even be money for more than just food and shelter soon. They're going to survive here.

He feels an intense relief that they've _finally made it work._ Found a place. Found a way. He hates the thought of how much he's been pushing Dani away—shutting her out, just like in the beginning—but all he's been able to think about was that they weren't going to survive, that nothing he could do would let them, _make_ them survive, and it was his past life all over again. Failing. _Failing._ Trying to keep people alive and failing.

And he just can't do that again.

Tonight, as with every night since they've come to Mimlal's (except on those nights they've eaten their evening meal with her), they go up the stairs to their room once Second Lamps are lit. There are no public spaces inside the house, and once Second Lamps are lit, everyone must be off the streets. Mimlal bolts the doors then, and most people eat after Second Lamps. The two of them usually share a little bread or fruit in their room, unless they've eaten earlier. Today one of Dani's clients paid in food—cold sausage rolls. So tonight they haven't.

They grope their way up the stairs. On the lower floors, some doors are open, and there's light to see by, but on the top floor all the doors are shut, and they have no lantern. They know the way by now, though.

The door is shut, but not locked. The doors on the first and second floors lock, but on the third and fourth floors they only latch. There's a place for a lock, but locks are expensive. They don't have anything to steal, anyway. When they still had their clothes from Jund, Dani hid them under the mattress until she sold them, but now they don't even have those. He lifts the latch. The room is oven-hot after the heat of the day, and they leave the door open for a few minutes to allow a breeze to pass through. It's not safe to leave it open all night, though, so they close it and bolt it. It's still early summer; when the heat gets bad a while from now—he can't stop himself from thinking 'weeks', even though it's an essentially meaningless concept—people will congregate on the city roofs in the night heat, and risk leaving their windows open if they stay inside. But for now it's not intolerable. Later, after midnight, it will even be cool.

The last light of day is coming in through the window. They open it in the morning and leave it open during the day, since there's nothing here to steal. There's a latticework shutter, which Daniel will be the one to close and bar, since he's the last into bed. Tonight, as every night, Dani strips naked, hanging her clothes carefully on a peg on the wall (money-pouch beneath) and putting her sandals on the floor beneath them. She pads across the room, slides her scribe-case under the bed, out of the way, where neither of them will step on it in the morning, and gets into bed, moving over toward the wall as far as she can get. She faces it, pressed against it, waiting for him to get into bed and take up his half.

During the day they're easy with each other. At night, more and more, she does her best to be tactful and simply pretend he isn't here. It's not because it's what she wants (even on Jund she wanted to be held). It occurs to Daniel that she hasn't had a single nightmare—not one—since they've gotten here. She told him once that she's always had them ('always' is a mutable term, but he knows it means since before the Furlings and maybe even since before SG-1; he's had nightmares ever since his parents died, though his are rarely bad enough to wake him), although she only has them after the 'bad parts' are over. That's old data. The bad parts are never going to be over now, and up until Saarsabah she's had nightmares consistently. But there are degrees of bad. You can get used to anything if it goes on long enough. And things can always get worse.

Have things really been that bad lately?

He suspects that yes, they have, because there are four things in the universe that Dani wants: food, shelter, an absence of Furlings, and him.

In a way Daniel knows he represents safety—just as she does for him—because his presence guarantees (seems to guarantee) an absence of Furlings. But more than that, _he's the only one there is._ It's hardly arrogance. It's realism. Who else knows, who else could understand, the universe as it truly is? Without him, she'd be as alone as he was on Kelowna.

Without her, _he'd_ be that alone. And it's time to admit, absolutely, even though in a tiny part of himself he feels that he's kneeling in the dust of a village square somewhere again, that he doesn't want that any more, ever again. He doesn't want love, he doesn't want forgiveness, but it's time to stop pretending that if she left, if she died, he'd _be just fine._

He takes off his clothes, just as he does every night, hangs them on the peg beside hers, puts his sandals on the floor beside hers, closes the shutter and bolts it, and climbs into the bed. Usually these days he just turns his back to her and settles into the relieved awareness of another day survived without disaster. He's not sure whether he didn't used to care as much (about a hundred days ago), or whether survival has gotten more difficult. He thinks, really, that it's that he's gotten used to being alive. He's developing much higher standards. And they've actually managed to meet them. And so tonight he spoons up behind her and puts an arm around her. He feels her startle in surprise at his touch, then lean back against him.

He's missed doing this. He's missed not spending his days and nights so worried about a hundred different forms of disaster—when he wasn't just trying not to think at all—that he didn't do this. Because all the things she hasn't said are true. They're really the only ones left.

He's warm where their bodies are pressed together, and he feels the sweat prickle on his skin. There's a bathhouse a couple of streets over, where Mimlal goes. Men and women go on alternate days, and admission is only ten abbas, but you have to bring your own soap and towels, and they don't own either—

Dani turns over, pressing against him and nipping at his throat. She doesn't say a word. Sometimes she likes to talk during sex, but the subject matter can be odd. Once it was radiocarbon dating techniques and non-destructive methods of source material analysis. Another time, her attempts to determine the extent of cross-pollination among _Goa'uld_ worlds by linguistic study of the dialects of English spoken there (inconclusive). She smells faintly of lemons, of sweat, of smoke from the lamps in the houses she's been in today. He thrusts his hips at her, gently, letting himself feel _want_. For once, something simple and uncomplicated, but there's nothing really simple here, is there? He wants this to be about the two of them, because they're all that's left, and Daniel believes that, but in that case, he's been having a lot of sex with ghosts lately, even if it's sex he's been paid for, and so the ghost he's thinking of is the one he wanted but never had. The one they both take to bed with them, always. She makes a growling noise in the back of her throat, a _stop thinking, Daniel,_ noise, and he tries to pull her up into a kiss, because kissing's nice, but she's sliding down his chest, pushing him onto his back.

She's right; the bed really _is_ narrow. Narrow and lumpy and the mattress—a thin wool ticking—isn't very soft, but the bedframe is sturdy and the door latches. He lets her roll him over, settling himself in the center of the mattress as she moves over on top of him. He's not quite sure where she's going with this tonight. Apparently where she's going is down, because she keeps sliding lower, nuzzling and licking at his chest and stomach until she reaches his penis. She rolls the foreskin back and licks at the head—a couple of times, experimentally—and he feels himself harden further, but he's still having difficulty—physically, mentally—with the concept of pleasure. He wants the closeness, to _give_ , but he's not completely sure, even now, that he wants to enjoy this (one of the many reasons why it took so them long to get here) and there aren't a lot of ways around that, now, are there? If they have sex, chances are he's going to come.

She takes him into her mouth and begins to play with him.

At first he thinks this is a transitional state, between what they're doing now and something they're going to do later. But then he realizes, from long(ish) experience, that this is what they're going to be doing. He feels himself relax, settling into the sensation, his mind pulling him slowly toward a focus on his body. Soon it will become the only thing there is. But not yet. He doesn't want this to be over quickly, and he knows she won't let it be. His mind drifts, thinking about sex, past and present. There's a difference between oral sex with men, and oral sex with women. Between (to be specific) being sucked by a man and sucked by a woman. Not the mechanics, of course; mouths and tongues don't differ that much between the sexes. It's intent, approach, expectation. Cultural baggage. Everyone brings that to bed with them, everywhere.

Some of his male lovers have been bisexual. All of his female partners have been straight. There's a riddle in that. Maybe there's just a qualitative difference in the way straight women perform fellatio ( _suck cock_ , he hears Dani say in his mind. His mirror twin's directness of language borders on the obscene, and he wonders why. It can't be something she learned from Jack. Defense mechanism? Threat display?), and while it's vanishingly unlikely that he's ever had a gay female partner (though you never know), there's always the bisexual female possibility.

In any event, homosexual fellatio (fine Latin words and technical; he's always enjoyed that) involves, explicitly, two people who have pushed past intolerance and oppression to find each other (even in the "Gay Chic/Bored Now" Nineties: New Year's Eve 1993 was the last time he'd openly had sex of the consensual social variety with a man, between one thing and another; Catherine recruited him the following March). In those encounters, no matter how you categorize them—true love, raw sex, fooling around—oral sex isn't just the appetizer; it's (often) the point. Worshipping one another's bodies with care and skill.

A lot of women don't seem to get that. Daniel supposes, even before there were incurable STDs, you were still taking all your partner's previous partners to bed with you, and okay, it's true that in fellatio (unlike cunnilingus) there _is_ some risk of asphyxiation, and he's certainly had greedy insensitive partners, but. He supposes it's unfair to generalize (given his overall-statistically-insufficient sample), but it seems to him that the majority of women (probably) treat fellatio as a way station to the main event. Coitus. Penetration. Sometimes it's made him think odd things: _it's something you want inside you but it's not something you're willing to kiss?_ But that wasn't absolutely true. Kate had loved giving him head (of course until he met her, he'd exclusively been with men; her reasons could have been anything from actual enjoyment to a desire to lure him into the clutches of heterosexuality; unfair and probably highly unlikely to think that but Daniel can't help wondering). Sarah considered it more of a favor (a lick and a promise, as it were; she'd tease him and get him hard, but she'd never take him all the way into her mouth and she'd certainly never let him come there). Sha're would never even consider it; well, differing cultures. He was too in love with her to care. Overall, though—and contrary to obvious expectations—he's left with the impression that women don't like men's bodies as much as other men do. Or they like them in a different way: not as an end in themselves, but as a means to an end. He may be over-thinking the whole subject. It's not as if that isn't one of his many failings.

Dani runs the pad of her thumb back and forth against his perineum. It's her right hand; he can feel the calluses, but it isn't painful. Enough to pull his mind closer. Not all the way there yet. Dani is different from all of them. Different from his male and female partners both. Something, he supposes, that's inevitable, given everything.

The thing he's worked hardest to teach her about sex—receiving sex—is to _slow down_. It's no particular surprise she's never gotten much out of it in the past; apparently she got the idea somewhere that she was being timed. Fine for men—male sexual response is (on the whole) quick and reliable. Slow is better for women, and more pleasurable for both of them, actually. The first time she went down on him, he was stunned, because apparently it's the one area of sex in which Dani _takes her time_. He doesn't know why, or where she learned it, or maybe it's just with him, but all of a sudden she has no place to go and nothing better to do. When she sucks him off, Daniel can actually feel her mind shut down, focusing everything on physical sensation. Hers. His. It's as if she's performing some bizarre form of erotic _kel'no'reem_ ; she's so completely relaxed, so far out of her own head, it's almost spiritual. Tonight her stillness fills him (unlooked-for gift), and he feels his mind finally let go, releasing him from words. He lifts a hand and lets it rest on her shoulder.

Each time he nears the edge of orgasm, she pulls him gently and firmly back, pressing hard at the base of his shaft, tugging gently at his balls, until he's sighing deeply with every breath he takes and his hands are fisted into the bedclothes and the whole compass of the world has narrowed to _now, please, now._

And he feels her slick finger slide into him and press upward and he feels his _cock_ slip all the way down her throat and her tongue rasps against his skin as she sucks and his hips come up off the bed and he comes.

 

#

In the morning Daniel wakes up to the sound of the prayer-singer calling the faithful to worship. The dawn has turned the shuttered window to a bright lattice-work again. _"Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light—"_ Edward Fitzgerald was a lousy translator, but an excellent poet.

Dani is sprawled across him, claiming him even in sleep. And Daniel used to want so much more out of life: his family alive again, the truth, his wife back. Peace and love and honor. He'll settle for a little tenderness in Purgatory now. And so he strokes her back—carefully—and when he's sure she knows where she is, he kisses her the rest of the way awake.

 

#

They move into the ground-floor room. Dani and Mimlal spend the day cleaning it first—Dani coughs for hours afterward—while Daniel takes customers at the kitchen table. Letters to loved ones. Letters of business—usually petitions to remind the recipient of favors owed. Sometimes a bill of sale.

Often he is paid only to read—a letter from the hand of another scribe, far away. News of marriages, births, deaths.

They have money.

They're far enough from wealthy that it isn't even funny, but in the middle of their first tenday downstairs, they realize that they have _too many coins_ for their coin pouches. They count it up, and pay Mimlal for a second tenday in advance, and there's still a lot of money, so they go to the market and buy clothes and towels and soap and a second veil for Dani—a colored one—and one of the gauzy shawls. And _they still have money._ So Daniel goes to be shaved at one of the shaving booths (five abbas; he'd been going every fourth or fifth day because Dani insisted) and they buy a meat pie (two toma) to share. By then they're exhausted with having spent all that money, and it's Women's Day at the baths, so he drops Dani and the soap and the towels off there and goes home.

They have a bed that's large enough for them to lie down side by side, and a table and a chair and a stool and _two_ windows. Daniel realizes that they really should have bought a lantern, and if they're going to have clothes and towels, they really need someplace to put them. At least they can buy a lantern soon. Maybe even two. He opens the shutters to the street—they fold back—and looks out, and soon enough someone comes along asking for the scribe. A letter must be written at once.

 

#

Forty-five days in Saarsabah. They have nearly the whole cost of his scribe's case set aside. His own case and seal will add to Daniel's importance here and let them work in different places. There's a chest in the corner now, under the other window—he had to haul it here from the second floor back as part of a complicated transaction that not even Dani understands, but it didn't cost them anything—and they're accumulating _possessions._

Three changes of clothes for each of them; he can wear clean clothes whenever he wants. His overrobe. Dani's increasing collection of veils. A clay pot to keep their money in—if they changed it to ashaf, they could carry all of it with them, but most vendors can't change an ashaf. Two lanterns and a flask of oil. A belt and a belt-pouch (for small change) and an ornate belt-knife. Daniel looks like a respectable citizen now.

For Dani to be truly respectable her ears should be pierced and she should wear bracelets. The cheap bracelets are glass and tin, the better are silver, the best is gold; you can tell a woman's status instantly by the kind and number of bracelets she's wearing. Mimlal wears gold, on her wrists and ears both. Not many bracelets, nor large earrings, but gold. But Dani won't get her ears pierced, and she won't consider wearing even the glass bracelets. Everyone knows they're foreigners. It doesn't matter, not as much as the fact that they eat regularly and they work and each of them goes to the baths every other day and they're _left alone._

On the day that Daniel comes home from the shop with his own scribe's case, Mimlal meets him in the doorway to make him an offer; if he and his wife wish to take their dinners with her instead of wasting good money at the cookshops—where you never know what you're actually getting—they can simply pay her to add their marketing to her own. She assures him it will be no trouble. And his wife is too thin.

(It's odd to think of Dani as his wife, but that's the way it is here. Of course, Mimlal also thinks Dani's his cousin—it's the only way to explain the resemblance—and fortunately that doesn't make it a proscribed relationship).

He thanks her for her kindness—and talks it over with Dani—and agrees. Mimlal's right. The food _is_ better.

Two hundred days, now, since the two of them met at the Mirror. The days are shorter now; they survived the summer (easier on the ground floor, but like most of the city, they spent the hottest nights on the roof) and autumn is brief; it's winter now; Dani's shawl and veil are wool, and so is his robe. Twilight comes before First Lamps are lit, and by Second Lamps, the city is dark. They've bought a quilt for their bed and a there's a dish of coals in their room at night for warmth. Last week Daniel helped Mimlal hang the winter shutters.

There's only one problem with so much food and free time and safety. It leaves him time to think. If you can call it that, because logic doesn't really seem to be getting him anywhere. Logic tells him that he's fed and sheltered and—most of all, oh, most of all—nobody is asking him to _bow down_ and murdering everybody around him when he doesn't. Saarsabah is reasonably safe and reasonably sane and it's a place he can earn money (and Dani can earn money) doing something that isn't whoring and isn't backbreaking manual labor. It ought to be as close to perfect as he can believe in any more, and apparently perfection isn't enough. The better things get, the less he wants to stay. He doesn't even know where he wants to go. Just somewhere that isn't here.

He goes from denial (he'll get over it) to bargaining (he'll go but leave Dani here, because she's happy here and she's safe, and as long as they're both in the same fucking _universe_ they should go on being one another's lucky rabbit's foot) to acceptance (he wants to go, and she won't let him go alone, so he'll just keep his goddamned mouth shut). The whole process takes about a week and a half (a week on Saarsabah is nine days—Daniel's not sure why, since it's merrily unconnected to the phases of the moons) and somewhere in the middle of the night on Day 14, Dani kicks him in the calf (he wasn't asleep and she knew it; the white nights are the worst) and says: "I don't know why I can't do this."

"I can't do it either," he says, and they spend the rest of the night talking. Making plans.

 

#

The first thing is money—just before they go, they'll change their copper for silver, and most of their smaller silver coins for larger ones—they've never been to a (civilized) world yet that doesn't have a market with a money-changer. They might both be able to work as scribes in the next city, and even if they can't, coming in with a recognized trade will go a long way toward helping them fit in. He knows he doesn't really care whether it does or doesn't, and he knows he should care about not caring. He might, if Dani weren't as eager to leave as he is. He wonders if they've spent so long running that they simply can't stop, even if nothing's chasing them. He hopes nothing is, but he has no intention of staying to see (you can't prove a negative). Maybe this is just the shape of their scars, now that the bleeding's stopped and the wounds have healed. Maybe the wounds will never heal and he can't take the quiet. Maybe this is what _folie á deux_ looks like. (A difference that makes no difference is no difference.)

But no matter how restless (impatient, panic-stricken) both of them are, they're equally unwilling to leave without adequate resources. That means a more aggressive search for clients. The taverns near the market quarter are a good place to look for business.

(Jack once said that no plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy. Jack was right about too many things. Daniel's not sure whether he should have listened to Jack more, or less.)

They've spent a hundred days here. In all that time, Saarsabah's only been real to him at the level of a complicated sociological puzzle-box he's needed to solve. Only now—when he's _done_ with it—does he actually look at it. In winter, twilight comes before First Lamps are lit; the strong gold light of the waning day drenches the soft stone of the buildings in color. Carved sandstone, softened with age; façades brightly colored in limewash and chalk, inlaid with mosaics of glass and tile above the ground floor. The public buildings and the noble houses are made of bright marble and colored stone, but this is a respectable mercantile district—what he would have called (worlds and lifetimes away) a nice working-class neighborhood. The streets here are wide enough to allow horse-drawn delivery carts to pass easily; the streets themselves are brick cobbles. some of the bricks have the name of the brickyard on them in raised letters—free advertising—and others simply have an ornamental design. The raised designs are for added traction when it rains, but also for beauty.

Daniel never noticed Saarsabah was beautiful before.

It makes him feel as if he should stay, should want to stay, should be the sort of man who can look at this, and at his life (what he's escaped, what he's gained) and say: _Enough. This is enough._ And he's never been that man. Unfortunately for everyone he's ever known in (his own) universe—and everyone he never did.

Dani is walking beside him, her scribe-case under her arm. She's wearing a veil and a shawl, both winter weight. He knows she was admiring the patterned ones in the market (summer-weight textiles are dyed a single color and embroidered; winter-weight ones have woven patterns), and in the end, bought the plainest of both; undyed wool. He doesn't touch her—even to take her arm—not on the street. Daniel still prefers to err on the side of caution; he's seen men touch women in public hundreds of times, but he doesn't know what social cues he might have missed.

They reach the tavern Dani's chosen for her afternoon's work. The sign is iconic—since most of the population is illiterate—on Saarsabah the symbol for a tavern is a garland of (what Daniel presumes is) some specific local flower. It's painted on a wooden plaque mounted on the wall beside the door. He'll go on to his own chosen venue and stay until First Lamps, then come back for her. They need to be indoors by Second Lamps, because of the curfew, but Mimlal's isn't too far from here. Nor is he planning on going far himself.

As usual, Dani bickers half-heartedly about him not needing to pick her up and drop her off as if she needs a bodyguard. As usual, he ignores her. He knows the streets are safe, just as he knows when Dani actually means any of her bitching. In truth (he's disliked so many of the truths he's come to learn, and all of them have changed him; there are times that he thinks that if he could come face-to-face with the man who stepped through the Stargate on his way to Abydos the two of them wouldn't even recognize each other) there's no occasion when he wouldn't rather be with her—and she with him—than either of them want to be apart. He knows there's something wrong about that. It's another thing on a very long list of things he doesn't care about.

The place he chooses is an inn-and-tavern (the sign for an inn is a broom, for some reason). Less turnover among the patrons, but travelers always need scribe-work. He claims a table in the corner, buys a pitcher of lemonade, and opens his case. Business is brisk enough, and he picks up some useful—or possibly disturbing—gossip.

Saarsabah is only one of several cities on this world. It's a kind of neutral zone, due to its proximity to the Stargate. The other cities have apparently been at war for years, and Saarsabah is involved—the Prince of the City, Prince Noura, had been away at war for some time—and if you'd been born here, you were likely to be "strongly encouraged" to serve in his army. (The fact that there was no possibility of Daniel being conscripted was the one reason they'd been willing to stay.)

He has no real idea of what they're all fighting about (it's got to be religion, money, or religion _and_ money), but last month (or about forty days ago) Prince Noura died in the fighting near Sohinad, which means that his heir, Demi-prince Itana, is now Prince of Saarsabah. There are a lot of ways Saarsabah is nothing like an oriental city, and one way in which it is: nobody has a single cross word to say about Itana, and Daniel may be a stranger here, but he knows this much: long wars and changes in government invariably mean two things: inconvenient old customs get kicked to the curb, and taxes go up.

They may be getting out just in time after all.

He's always had a fairly good sense of time. Not so good at telling it by the moon and stars (anyone can tell time by the sun), but he's pretty damned good at knowing _how much_ time has passed. He's already starting to pack up his case when Zakhri, the tavernmaster, brings out the ritual lamp and lights it. First Lamps. He's had to leave a number of clients unsatisfied; he's promised he'll come back tomorrow, earlier. Some have letters they want read. Others want to answer letters. He'll stop in the marketplace and buy some more vellum first. It's always good to have enough supplies. (He mentions that his wife is also a scribe—they've long-since learned that there are some things the sexes won't cross the gender-barrier for—he's not sure how much interest there is, but when he comes back tomorrow, if someone wants Dani instead of him, he can probably get Zakhri to send a messenger to Mimlal's or to whatever tavern she's decided to work in.) He's out on the streets a few minutes later.

 

#

**_And here is where Daniel's version of the story ends. Three days later he and Dani are captured by Ixis at the Stargate, and you know what happens then. I'd always intended to tell the captivity from Daniel's POV, but alas. I started it in fragments like the one below:_ **

#

They were being treated like a combination of zoo specimens and prisoners, and oddly, the intersection of roles made their position worse than either. Zoo specimens were, after all, animals (at least on Earth) and were left a certain amount of their mental and emotional privacy. And prisoners were in the hands of the enemy, constantly subject to overt and covert assault, required to escape _(don't think of Jack)_ but (in the normal course of things) would remain in their captor's hands until death, escape, or release.

He supposed this was what slavery was like. To become an object, no more human to your owner than a table or a chair. But you _were_ human. Aware, and self-aware, and able to think, feel, suffer...

He'd promised himself a thousand times since the Ori came that he would never think of Earth or the billions he'd murdered, and even now he managed _(most of the time)_ not to think of Jack. But he can't keep from thinking of Teal'c. Born into a slavery far worse than this one, and oh, _God, he'd had no fucking clue._

Of course he'd seen slavery on Earth before the Stargate Program. He'd grown up in the Middle East, where it was still practiced under a hundred different names. He'd traveled throuh Central America, where it was certainly not unknown. He'd deplored it, done what he could to help, known he couldn't stop it, thought he understood what it must be like.

But he'd only seen it from the outside.

 

#

 

 

**_And that's everything I''ve got. Thanks for reading!_ **


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